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How to Stop Spam Comments
I am running my religious blog The Disciplers on a self-hosted Wordpress. My blog has been gaining a good momentum of traffic for the past three months. Most of my visitors came from organic searches. But as it gain a good amount of traffic, it is also gaining a good amount of spams.
Before, I used to delete and monitor about 4-15 spams a day, but now, I used to review about 30 spams a day. I hate to see these spams flooding my spam comment section. I am tired and frustrated of deleting them, and reviewing them one by one.
Why do people spam and how they do it?
Some bloggers who spam wants to gain one way links from other blogs. One way links are very essential in gaining page rank from search engines. Most of these frustrated bloggers places a mediocre (sometimes it’s still related) comment containing the link going to their blogs.
They do this with the hope of gaining popularity believing that those websites and blogs where they comment were set in “dofollow”. While in reality, many of professional bloggers and web masters nowadays apply the “nofollow” code on their blog and website.
Frustrated Internet Marketers spam to market their products. Many of them were really bad spammers. They use software bots to automatically detect blogs and automatically leave spam comments. Most of these spams were about Viagra, sex products, dating sites, etc. There are hundreds of them. And this is what I hated the most, my blog is a religious blog and they post comments all about sex.
How to Stop Spam?
There is no 100% solution of stopping these spam comments especially if spammers enter the comments manually. However, there is a good way of minimizing it for more than 90%. As I try this method, I almost get rid of spam especially those nasty spams from auto bots.
The solution that I am talking about is using a “Captcha” plugin or script or whatever you call it. What I installed in my blog is “reCaptcha”. A Captcha is a small program that identifies to whether the commentator is a real human or a computer (bots). Captcha uses (most of the time) a distorted images of characters where bots cannot read while humans can.
I personally used reCaptcha on my blog. It is owned by Google and is completely free just like all other Captcha plugins that you can see in Wordpress.
I know that this process of protecting your blog and website is not new. In fact, Blogger.com has been using this as a built in feature on their blog platform. And as you can see, most blogspot rarely get spam. But let us accept it, most bloggers don’t use Captcha so that they won’t hinder people to put comments on their blogs which love interactivity.
The only downside that I am seeing from Captcha is the interactivity of blog commentators. Most commentators don’t like to have any difficulty in commenting. They want to have a smooth way of commenting.
However as a blog owner, you will have to choose between securing your site from unwanted and unrelated spams and links which can definitely drag you to the bottom of page rankings or getting some real commentators who really value what they read? The choice is definitely yours.
But as for my personal opinion, placing a Captcha plugin is one of the best ways to protect and value your blog and website. Furthermore, it can also help you get real valuable links that can really help your blog. From about 30 spam comments a day, I rarely get 1 spam comment now.
4 comments:
I read an Article on bloggerluv the other day saying if you want more comments then don't use CAPTCHA's I took the Advice and within 20 minutes I had 4 spam comments.I do not care if I get comments and have seen people allowing spammy comments so I don't comment on these blogs anymore because they think the number of blog comments is more important than the discussion If you allow one spam comment you are leaving yourself open to many.
That is exactly the idea Roezer. As I said in 2nd to the last paragraph, you will have to choose between the two, to have a blog full of spam links which will drag you to the bottom of search engines, or you will have an "open-to-comment" blog.
As for me now, I have a very minimal amount of spams the time I used Captcha.
Considering the commenting part, I think, people will still comment on your blog even if you have captcha as long as you are delivering a good quality content. People will love your blog because of the content, not because of commenting part.
Hello Again Vince
Answering to Comments is always a good way to bring the reader back.There is also another type of spam or inappropriate comments that I will no longer accept these were comments made on some tutorials that I done were a person said it does not work when I know it does.I approved the comment but later I noticed that my search visitors for this page had fallen.This was because it does not work was showing in the description costing me maybe 100 visits a week or more the same could be said for other spam comments showing in the description and you could be losing out because of spam also.
You really should be careful in accepting valid comments. However, there is a way where comment links will not be counted by the Search Engines.
I don't know if you are familiar with "nofollow" SE tag. If you are using wordpress and you have a plugin called Ultimate SEO Plugin or any SEO plugin, (most probably) you have the option of setting it to "nofollow".
This will tell the search engines not to rank the links on that particular page.
However, you must note that part of page ranking measurements are inlinks and outlinks. To have a good standing on that, all outbound and inbound links should be related with each other.
And this is what's difficult in spam comments. You can have even a hundred links in just a day, but most (if not all) links are totally UNRELATED with the post.
And because you have hundreds of totally unrelated links, your post having that will really suffer.
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