For those of you who administer blogs, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t – read on. If you’ve enabled comments for your blog posts and your website becomes more searchable and accessible by search engines, you will start to receive many comments on your articles. Some of them may be genuine and unique, but many will be simply garbage, or something defined as blog comment spamming. Such comments are usually posted by automated bots (scripts) across several hundred sites, and what isn’t unique about these comments is that they’re all the same, and don’t relate in any way to the original blog post. Some examples of comment spam are “I like your site, I will bookmark it now and add it to my RSS feed.”, or “Cool site, where did you get your information”. Some spam comments are much longer in content, but the one commonality for all of them is that they don’t usually directly address the article that they’re supposed to comment on. One way of figuring out if a comment is unique or not is to do a quick search on it in Google, but after a while it shouldn’t take you a long time to figure out if a comment is genuine or not.

Many of these spam comments are posted with a link, that links to the site in which the author is trying to drive more traffic to. There are potential consequences for both the spamming comment poster, as well as the site where the spamming comment is being posted on. Many search engines like original content – content that was explicitly written by you, and not repeated too many times anywhere else. For example, the more original content your website has, the higher it will rank on Google. If you allow comment spamming on your site, you run the risk of making your website less relevant to searches, because the content of your site (the spam comment) is duplicated across many other sites. The other consequence is that to the spam comment poster, in that they run the risk of getting their site delisted from the search engine indexes.

So time now for some tips. First off, don’t approve any comments that you may come across on your blog. Go through all of them with a fine toothcomb, and only approve the ones that address specific items in your blog article. Secondly, if you’re going to post comments on other blogs, make sure they’re unique, well thought out, and well written. Don’t do a copy and paste job, cause it will hurt your blog in the long run.

For comment moderation, blogging software such as WordPress come with an anti-spamming plugin called Akismet. All you have to do is enable the plugin by getting a WordPress.com API key. The majority of the time Akismet will find 99% of comment spam automatically. It’s not enabled by default, so make sure to turn it on.

Happy Blogging from Palmer Marketing …