Tyler on Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Visitors to your website can comment on the blog posts that you write on your website. This can add a community feel to your site as well as giving you feedback from your websites audience.
However, spammers have taken advantage of this ability on your website too. They will try to submit comments onto your site in order to have a link to their website available from your website giving them the possibility of more website visitors.
Some examples of spam comments are:
Here are some of the top tips from a good article “10 Tips For Identifying Blog Comment Spam”
1. Keywords in the name field.
Some commenters don’t use their real name. Others prefer to use keywords instead of any kind of name. Think of things like “Low Energy Light Bulbs”, “Texas Home Renovation”, or my personal favourite – “Wallpapering Weekly Newsletter”. Actually, I made those up. Anyway, keywords can be a good sign that the commenter is just hoping to get a link from your site to theirs.
2. Generic appreciation.
The “nice post” discussion is a bit of a running joke around here. You can see where it all began in my first post on this blog – 10 signs your blog sucks. Still, that aside, some spammers seem to like saying nice things about your blog. All they’re doing is trying to convince you that their comment should go on your blog. Again, it often means they’ll get a link from your site. If a comment says little more than “wow, nice post… I’ll be back to read more” … dig a little deeper. You might find that the person concerned is not as sincere as you might think.
3. Comment length.
Is the comment really, really long? Or abnormally short? As with all of these points, it’s not a guarantee, but sometimes the length is a giveaway. I’ve seen some amazingly long comments that didn’t contain anything except links to dodgy sites. Some really short ones, too – with just one solitary spam link.
and most importantly…..Check The Link.
If the comment has a link, check it out. If the link goes to a canadian pharmacy or some other unsolicited site, just go with your gut feeling and spam the comment.
You can read the full contents of the article here including the other tips, though these three are going to be your most effective way to fight spam.
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