An interesting indicator of your blog popularity is the quantity of spam comments you are receiving. Lately I saw an increasing number of spam comments popping on some of my articles. In order to fight spam, I took a few measures when setting up my blog.
As I was saying, the number of blog comments on Dukeo keeps growing every day. While this is a good way to know if your website is correctly indexed in search engines (spammers are generally scraping search engine results to spot the articles they are going to spam), this problem can become extremely time-consuming, especially nowadays, because spammers are getting clever and some comments like “I love your blog”, while appearing as legit comments, can be spam comments.
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First of all, I have Akismet installed on my blog. Akismet is great at catching spam blog comments and protecting your blog. It comes pre-installed in WordPress installation package and is pretty straightforward to activate. You only need to get an Akismet Key in order to get your copy activated. Akismet is totally worth the extra 30 seconds needed to get the key.
The second step I took to reduce the amount of work needed to filter spam comments is closing comments 14 days after a post is published. This means that people have 14 days after a post is published to say what they have to say on the subject. As I am posting a new entry per day, this means that I never have more than 14 posts with comments open. It makes it easy to follow all the discussions and spot spam comments.
Do you take any additional step to protect your blog against comment spam?
32 Comments
I don’t use Akismet. Never have. Especially having to pay. I just use SI-Captcha Anti Spam and that is absolutely brilliant at getting spam. Try it .
Paying for Akismet? I don’t know where you saw that… It’s 100% free to get it for your blog.
My mistake. I must have my head up my bum again. lol
Akismet is a great tool. I am sure a lot of people use it. Great post.
Yep, that’s definitely the number 1 tool to fight against blog comment spam.
Thats great suggestion. Closing the comments after 14 days. It would get rid of spam and gives you time for readers to comment.
I don’t remember exactly where I saw that but that really effective since spammers usually find you through search engines and it can take more than 14 days to get very high search engine rankings.
I see you implement this yourself. It’s a good technique.
That sounds a brilliant way to go. I agree.
You can always spot the spam comments. Usually some counterfeit website or unwanted websites that are not suitable for the general audience. I delete as soon as I get them.
or some Viagra/Cialis advertising on totally unrelated bogs :)
Yes I delete them as soon as I get Spam.
Yes Akismet is a fine device for getting rid of unwanted spam. But I agree with First Website you can always use a captcha to stop software applications. That way at least people have to either visit your site or have some sort of captcha service. Makes it harder to spam.
Captcha is a good thing to use, but you also make your readers life more complicated. The important thing is to find the right balance…
I think some Spam Commentors have gotten even sneakier. I had one guy post a comment that was really an article. It did not directly respond to the blog post in question but because the content was relevant to my blog I accepted it. Trouble was for the following two weeks I had the same comment come through. So in the end I deleted it.
Personally I am sick of all the spam comments. Don’t people do real work instead of taking the easy way out.
I am sick of the spam comments as well. Thats the trouble with blogs they attract spammers. Mind you my other site which is not a blog gets a fair share too in the way of spammy link exchanges.
Spammers are quite creative and I think they will find new ways to get their way!
Unluckily, that’s quite true.
Spam is a total nuisance….there should be a stronger online body to address this issue.
Comment spam is becoming more and more tricky since spammers are not only making comment with hundreds of links to pharmaceutical products, but they also disguise themselves as blog fans to get approved.
I guess we just have to grin and bear this pain!
Spam currently wastes 10% of productive man hours in businesses !
Spamming is becoming a costly nuisance…do let me know if there are paid solutions to resolve these issues
How do small businesses cope with spam?
They can use Captcha on their forms for starters.
Can also use basic, free spam filters or the tips recommended in this blog post.
There are a lot of tools available but it can be complicated to make a choice when you don’t know much.
Akismet has certainly saved me a lot of effort, it filters over 100 a day and I my site doesn’t even get that much traffic (half of it is probably the spammers).
I think there must be something wrong with my setup because I used to use a theme which didn’t show the comment box and I still had comments coming through.
Actually, from what I understand, the spammers are loading directly the script to post comments without actually loading your pages.
Ah I see, thanks Steven, that makes sense. Does that mean any anti spam measures like SI captcha and logic questions are not shown when they load the script directly?
James
I have no idea about this. You should probably ask directly the developers of these 2 anti-spam plugins to get a clear answer.