Comment Spam and Search Engines
Why would a spammer use your blog to target a search engine?
- The concept of PageRank and its importance in search engine rankings
- Google Bombing as a technique to influence search engine rankings
- Spammers leave comments with specific link text to boost their search ranking
Fighting Comment Spam
Comment Moderation
Comment Moderation is very effective in addressing unwanted comments. The best defense against comment spam is just watching your comments. Under Manage →︎ Comments, it shows a listing of the latest comments on any post, and you can quickly scan the comment activity on your site. The faster you respond to comment spam on your site, the less likely the spammers will return.
On the Combating Comment Spam page, you will find a list of more proactive measures against comment spam, including links to helpful plugins.
Stealth Spam
Spammers find new and creative ways to be sneaky all the time. You may notice that posters leave comments on your site which look perfectly normal except for the commenter’s name or URL, which likely references a product or a site selling something.
It’s good practice to visit the URLs of people who leave comments on your blog to determine whether the poster is sincere or spammy. If you see one that looks suspicious, you can delete the comment entirely or leave the comment and delete the URL.
Another way of stealth is to use a div-tag around a bundle of hundreds of links. This becomes increasingly common because many software directly displays the given HTML tags and not the HTML code. To avoid this, the software must “strip out,” in other words: filter the HTML tags while inserting the comment into the database.
The Good News
The good news is that WordPress’ built-in tools and history of combating comment spam mean that most WordPress blogs get very little spam, and when they do, it’s easy to address. Here’s a quote from noted web author Molly E. Holzschlag about comment spam and her switch to WordPress:
“My ISP refused to continue dealing with me because the server molly.com resided on was brought to its knees twice due to spam floods. I was spending up to two hours PER DAY to undo the spam much less post. Since switching to WP, I’ve had exactly five emails sent to me automagically for moderation. 3 of them were spam, 2 were just enthusiastic posts with multiple links from a reader.”
