Eliminate Spam Comments on Your WordPress Blog

You probably know by now (especially if you have a popular blog or a blog that is ranked high on the search engines) that you are getting an increase in Spam comments on your blog. It can become very annoying, as you have to go in and delete each of them manually.  Some days you may get over 100 spam comments.

Before I get into the solution, let me first define what SPAM comments are. Spam comments are comments that are automatically posted to your blog by automated bots or scripts. Some people have software that they use to target sites that they know are getting high traffic. The comments that they make usually are garbled keywords and hyperlinks that do not make any sense. You will know right away, because the comments are not relevant to anything that was said in your article post.

Several people have called me within the past few weeks to ask how can they reduce spam comments on their blog. Let me tell you in 4 quick steps how to do this. I have implemented the these solutions on my own personal blogs and also for many of my clients. They have confirmed that the number of SPAM comments were reduced by 95% almost immediately after the plug-in was installed.

Here are the steps to reduce the Spam Comments on your WordPress Blog:

1. Install the ASKIMET plugin on your blog. This plugin will check your comments against the Akismet web service to determine if the comments look like spam or not.

2. Install the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plug-in. It adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. This plugin prevents spam from automated bots. Or you could try the reCAPTCHA plugin as well. This plug-in is an anti-spam method.

Here’s how the reCAPTCHA plug-in works. When someone tries to post a comment to your blog, they will see the graphic and will be required to type the words that match the image. The spam bots cannot see and read these images like a real person can, therefore they will not be able to get through to post the spam comment.

An example of what the reCAPTCHA image will look like on your blog:

3. This is all that I needed to reduce the Spam on my blog. If for some reason, you still have issues with Spam after implementing the first 2 options, some bloggers have recommended closing comments to your old posts. These old posts are normally targeted because the spammers know that the posts have been around a while and have been indexed and ranked by the search engines vs a more newer recent post.

4. One final way to prevent Spam and Junk e-mail in general is to not post your email address on your site. You could use a contact form instead.

Well these are just a few methods that I know have worked for me. What other options have you tried? Let me know. Please share your comments in the comments section.

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