I’ve become increasingly aware of how many people are permitting spam comments into their blogs. I do email people I find specifically with help but it would be good to include a general heads up as it’s on the increase!

So let’s start at the beginning; Mr Spammer runs a dodgy medication selling website. Mr Spammer is in a high competition industry so needs to be found in Google. He’s optimised his site but now needs some links back from other quality sites like yours to show Google that his is popular (which it’s not) and equally full of quality content (which it isn’t). Mr Spammer logs on to blog after blog commenting on as many articles he has time to and all he has to do is make sure he enters his web address into the ‘Your Website’ box. If the blog on your nice site is unprotected, (and sometimes even if it is), his comment will appear, more importantly his name will link through to his website, and Google takes that link as a ‘thumbs-up’ from you giving it a tiny bit more importance.

Here’s the worse bit; when Google realises that Mr Spammer is actually spamming, it may penalise the site in question, and worse penalise every site which links to it… including your own quality, innocent website. He’s made a few sales so happy to relaunch site number 24763 on a new url and you’re made to suffer.

So here’s what you should do:

1. Learn the difference between a genuine supportive comment and a spam one. If they have included a link, it should link to a genuine business website and the comment should add something to your reputation or article. If they link to medicines, abortion pills, weight loss pills etc. you can safely assume it’s spam. Anything in the middle is up to you.
2. Install some anti-spam solutions like the following:
1. WordPress Akismit is one good piece of software, I believe they charge for it now, but that’s evidence of their success. It will stop most spam comments getting in and allow genuine comments through.
2. Self-moderation is the next step, Built into WordPress and others are a number of filters, you can hold all comments for manual approval, or set those with links included for approval. The latter is best and saves you time. If they don’t contain a link, it’s almost certainly harmless. You just have to ensure you check regularly to approve good comments and delete spam.
3. Install a captcha, again free on Wordress and others, this is the box which asks you to type what you see in the picture. This won’t fool determined spammers but the majority of spammers are after quantity not quality so if they don’t get through easily, they won’t waste their time trying and will go elsewhere. If your site happened to be Microsoft, Apple, BBC etc. you would be in for a rough ride.
3. Set nofollow to all user links. This is usually an option in your blogging or site software which allows you to set user links to ‘nofollow’ which basically is a message to Google (and others) saying “Yes I’m showing this link, but I don’t want you to treat it as an endorsement, I’m just the messenger.”
4. Finally, go through your previous comments and delete any which you’ve decided are spam.