Now, this post has been brewing for a while, but I was not sure how I wanted to go about addressing comment spam. First off, comment spam is what you would think it is. It is the unwanted, off topic comment of either a bot, a person hired by a company, or someone who dropped in and totally bypassed the post to comment instead of use the contact form.
Some people have friends who visit their blog and leave comments that may not relate to the post, and for some that is fine. However, this post is more directed toward spammers, both bots and actual people who are hired (or spamming for their own site/ company) by a company to post on your blog.
Why do they do this? Well, they want to attract your business and business from your visitors.
You can use Askimet, a Captcha (or Recaptcha) or any other plugin or script to combat / block spam, but the spam will come through and sometimes it may be from the simplest and somewhat harmless message at first glance.
Here are a few things to identify these comment spammers:
➡ How did the reader fill out their name? Obviously if it looks a bit suspicious, you might want to delete it.
➡ What is the URL that the person left?
➡ What is the email address that was left? I tend to see a lot of spammers using .ru domain extension names in emails. Also, if the name and the email address are different – for example, a “Pat” left a comment and within their email address, it said “derrickwaters@——“, then that might be a bit questionable.
➡ What did they leave as a comment? Some of the most recent ones I have seen:
– “You write well. Are you a professional writer?”
– “I did not understand at first, but after going through your post again, I understood well.”
– “Great post. I subscribed to your RSS feed.” (<-- I have NEVER had a real person leave a comment like that and most have illegitimate addresses, names, and even the URL is suspicious.)
- "I'm going to go subscribe to your RSS feed."
Of course, the other obvious are long comments with multiple links to different products. I am not going to copy and paste an example of that.
It might suck to take a little time to remove comment spam, but it is worth it. If you are lucky enough to be self-hosted and have IP deny, you can use the IPs that your blog records for each comment and block the spammers.
How do you identify and take care of tricky comment spammers?
I use Akismet and Spam Karma 2. They have only let one spam post through in 2 years, but I’m a low-traffic site too.
Spammers are getting smarter, its a good thing I can moderate and delete the obvious generic comments. The ones that just look like someone copied and pasted it.
This is such a great post, thanks for the great info. and I am so excited to read more
It is a great article to understand spam in the blog comment.
Commentor will be careful about their comment in the respect of comment.