Let us talk about why having spam comments on your blog is a bad thing. Another way of telling if comments on your blog are spam is by looking out for comments containing phrases such as great blog or nice post. Well, just as you might receive spam messages in your email box, people are going to leave spam comments on your blog. When your comments section is full of spam messages, legitimate visitors will find it difficult to engage.
As a result, if your regular readers notice lots of spam comments in your posts, this can deter them from leaving comments and providing valuable feedback. If visitors see a bunch of nonsensical comments offering little to no value to readers, visitors are more likely to consider your blog as another spammy blog and just move on.
Sometimes spam may sneak in, or comments may be left that do not seem clearly spammy. Keep in mind you will have to frequently check the particular spam folder, because some legitimate comments are mistakenly marked as spam.
If your site has spam comments on every other page of your site, this makes Google think you are encouraging the posting of spam content on your site by allowing spammers to show up with spam comments, creating a bad user experience. Allowing poor links in your website tells both Google and your readers that you are not concerned with the quality of the content in your website, even if they are only blog comments. One way to fight spam is to allow less links in comments.
Google does not like links that go nowhere, and it is even more disapproving of links pointing to poor neighborhoods — I can only imagine how much of an effect comments spam has had on search engine rankings after that. Heres a blog post that announced the introduction of no follow links in order to combat comment spam, in which Google makes it very clear that Google does not like webpages that contain lots of spammy comments.
Other blog owners would reject a comment as spam, based on it being in a different industry than their blog. In a bid to boost the amount of comments featured in their posts, some bloggers will approve all their comments whether or not they are spam.
It is easy to approve those comments and have them re-appear on your blog. Comments are created when someone uses the comments form on your blog posts to interact with your content.
WordPress, Wix, and most other blogging providers have built-in comment systems which enable your readers to discuss your blog posts. You can find more tips for setting up your own comment moderation system on the WordPress Codex. In addition to installing these spam-fighting tools, you should also turn on moderation for comments and user-generated content, so you are manually moderating the comment before it goes live in the article, web page, blog post, or any other content type.
Implementing and following the guidelines in this post will eliminate the comment spam in your blog, surface high-quality conversations, and make your site look good and trustworthy both to search engines and visitors. This post will cover everything you need to know in order to take control of the comments on your blog, remove all spam, and encourage more of your visitors to leave genuine, authentic opinions and add value to the conversation.
No matter how careful you are about the settings on WordPress, which plugins you have turned on, and how much you read through comments, there is bound to be a few spammy, low-quality comments slipping past your defenses. The good news is that WordPress built-in tools and history of fighting comment spam means most WordPress blogs receive very little spam, and when it does, it is easily dealt with.
Many spammers are using dedicated blog spam tools such as trackback senders to circumvent comments spam protection in popular blogging systems such as Movable Type, WordPress, and others. Additionally, there are many ways webmasters can fight blog spam, using other spam-fighting plug-ins for blogs that have trademarks (e.g., Challenge, Referrer Bouncer) which block most spam comments. Facebook also provides a similar system, which allows for you to effectively outsource blog comments to companies who have the resources to completely block spam (and, by replacing the URL field with a commenters profile, remove much of the incentive to spam).
This will prevent people from posting spammy comments with link to their signatures to your site, and will also handle any external links posted via the comments form on your site from the people posting comments, simply to build a backlink from your site back to theirs, who posted the comments. Left could help blog owners in finding irrelevant websites because it would show them recent posts in comment authors blogs. Under Manage-Comments, shows the list of latest comments for each post, and it is possible to scan comment activity quickly across the website.
From what I saw, overlooking comment spam could actually worsen the issue, since there are lists floating around among the spammers containing blogs which are not moderating comments, or even posts which contain specific keywords that they are supposed to target. Even this does not capture comment spam on blogs — as I think relevant comments left with a bad intention could be spammy too.