Spamming has been one of the most serious problems being faced by all blogging system, in which WordPress is not left out. Though the post or article area is not available for spamming, but the comments area are wide open to those tormentor of the Internet (spammers).
Most website and blog owners want to boost their search engine rankings by having many external links pointing to their websites. This is one of the problems why comment spam is now rampant and it is causing many problems for website owners. The annoying part is that most of the spam comments are been posted by bots, making use of different IP's. It won't be an easy task for website owners to sit down and start eliminating spam comments all the time. This will result in wastage of precious time that can even be spent on something else or be used for composing new articles.
Why Posting Spam Comment to Advertise a Blog is Useless
1. You Are Been Referred to as Spammer: Once you are spamming other websites, you will be branded as “Spammer” in your whole life. At least, the blog or website you are promoting will be in trouble. Most people hate spam very much. They may be willing to report your blog or website to your hosting provider or affiliate company about your act.
2. You Can Get Penalized: If you are promoting your website by leaving useless comments on another website with your website URL, the website owner may report your site to your hosting provider and you may get banned immediately for trying to tarnish the image of their company. This can also lead to Google penalizing you. An
3. You are NOT a Professional: Mostly, lazy and unprofessional bloggers and website owners will think of spam commenting as means of promotion. You will also be seen as unprofessional because you are not using content but using tricks to get links and you will never get any trust from visitors again.
4. Comment System Trust is Violated: Blog comment system are for expanciating more about the main article and not for posting links. Message boards and even forums are all serving the same purpose. People participated over there believe that they can get valuable information on those places. In other words, if bloggers leave spam comments on those places, they are violating the code of trust in those places.
5. Spam Comment can lead to Low Ranking: After adding spam comments to other websites, the links will be regarded as one-way back-links. It will be listed on a higher page result. However, such result will not last long and finally, those spam links will be removed and no back-links to your website anymore.
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How to Deal with Spam Comments on WordPress Blogs
1. Get Rid of the Website Address Field
Some people drop useless comments to promote their products or websites. This mainly happens because of the website address field in available in the comment form. This field will not only invite bot spammers but also the manual spammers.
Some spam comments example are; good post, nice article, I have bookmarked your blog, you are such talented blogger, thanks for sharing and lots more. They are just spam comments. New blogger generally gets influenced by such comments and approved them. You can stop those kinds of spam by removing the address field in the comment form.
2. Make All Comments links Nofollow
Making website comment links dofollow will invite more spammers. So it is advisable to make all comment links/URL's nofollow. It reveals true commentator.
3. Disable Comments on Media Attachments
Wordpress by default use to create a page for each attachment ypu upload to your WordPress Blog. Comments might be available on the media's page. This feature have been removed on most of the mew WordPress theme. If you found out your theme still have the feature, just paste the below code in functions.php file in your theme folder. You can also redirect attachments to the article using Yoast SEO plugin to fix this issue.
## Disable Comments on Media Attachments
function filter_media_comment_status( $open, $post_id ) {
$post = get_post( $post_id );
if( $post->post_type == 'attachment' ) {
return false;
}
return $open;
}
add_filter( 'comments_open', 'filter_media_comment_status', 10 , 2 );
4. Disable Trackbacks
Trackback is also one of the things that cause spam comments. You can disable it from your WordPress dashboard by; Open WordPress Dashboard >> Under Settings choose Discussion >> Remove tick from Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new articles >> Save changes.
5. Use Captcha Verification
Use WP-reCAPTCHA plugin to stop spam comments. This plugin adds verify code option in comment form which shows text or numeric image to verify humanity while commenting. This idea helps you to stop spam comments by bots.
6. Block Sexual and Offensive Words in Discussion Settings
You might have noticed most of the spam comments contents offensive or sexual words. Most of the illegal websites domain contains such words. It is bad for the blog reputation. So you can block comments containing such word just by adding a list of such words in the blacklist under the discussion settings. You can also use this to block certain IP address. Just put IP you wanna ban in the blacklist and save the settings. Note that it is One word per line.
7. Stopping Spam Comments Using .htaccess
To stop spam comments with htaccess simple grab the IP address of the spammer. Then add the code inside your blog htaccess file and save. Replace xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx with the IP address of spammers you want to block. You can add multiple IP addresses in same code.
order allow,deny
deny from xxx.xxxx.xxx.xxx
deny from xxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxx
allow from all
8. You can Use One of the Third Party Comment Systems
If you are fed up of the spam comments you can make use of other comment systems on your WordPress Blog. Other comment system includes; Facebook Comment System and Disqus Comment System.
9. Install Anti-Spam Plugin
You can also install any anti-spam plugin to reduce spam comments. Akismet is a good option but there are more other plugins in WordPress Repository plugin page that can perform similar tasks.
More WordPress Tips
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– Best Adsense or Ads Optimized WordPress Themes to Boost Revenue
– Why CommentLuv is Important for WordPress Blog
– On Page SEO Tips to Rank Higher on Search Engines
– How to Recover Social Share Counts After Changing Permalinks or Protocol
Really great. Thanks for writing this article.
Hi Hiidee,
Spamming is the worst. Once a spammer is identified, people will spread the news quickly and your business will go down the tubes.
Being spammed can be done if one doesn’t follow what you have written here. It is wise to always check for spam.
-Donna
First time seeing you here Maam, Thanks for sharing your view.
Best Regards,
Hiidee
Hello, Hiidee!
I am very much controlling the spam, thanks to Akismet! 🙂
I understand that the spam is attracted once the site is popular or even active but you presented some good points to really tackle the spam at good scale.
I will go through the methods you shared and see how it goes.
~ Adeel
Happy to hear from you Adeel.
Wishing you a joyful week.
Brilliant Article!! I appreciate your points. It’s more informative and entertaining. Thanks for sharing the information about spamming comments.
currently, This is a big issue that people doing lots of doing spamming through commenting and You shared really helpful article here.
well written and guide for prevent Spam comment on WordPress