Spam Comments and Wordpress

If you own a Wordpress blog, you might have already come across comment spam. Comment spam can become a very big headache if you run multiple blogs. However, there are solutions to tackle this problem. Wordpress comes with some inbuilt mechanisms to prevent spam and then, there are some external plugins that can completely prevent your blog from receiving spam comments.

Comment spam is very much similar to e-mail spam in motives. While e-mail spam tries to achieve advertising and exposure, comment spam tries to create backlinks. As you may be aware, most of the major search engines emphasize backlinks while ranking webpages. And this is what spammers are after.

To tackle the problem of comment spam, Wordpress adds the no-follow tag to links added via the comment box. This means that search engines won’t value the links. However, this hasn’t completely eradicated the problem. Spammers are still spamming blogs, may be, with the intention of getting direct visitors.

Here are some techniques to prevent comment spam:

Akismet: Wordpress comes installed with a plugin called Akismet that recognizes spam comments and separates them from the others. To use Akismet, you will have to activate it and then enter your API key. You will have to register your email with Wordpress to get your API key. Akismet is very accurate in recognizing spam comments.

Spamkarma: Spamkarma is a plugin to prevent comment spam. It is designed to prevent all forms of automated comments. For more information on spamkarma see http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

Bad Behavior: Bad behavior is a set of PHP scripts that prevents spam comments. It acts as a gatekeeper and blocks spam bots from accessing the pages of your blog. For more information about Bad Behavior see http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/

In addition to using these plugins, I would also recommend using a captcha along with the comment box. This will ensure that only humans can post comments. However, there are some bots which can read the characters of the catcha. If you use any of the plugins I mentioned above, a captcha will not be required.

There is a plugin called reCAPTCHA that does a good job. Check it out @ http://recaptcha.net/plugins/wordpress/ Use it and I am sure you will stay spam free :)