Prevent WordPress Comment Spam

None of us like spam comments on our WordPress Blogs. Why do they do it anyway? Well I’ll explain for the curious… Because if you understand why it is done, then you can understand what you need to do to prevent most of it… yes, only ‘most’ of it.

Why Do People Spam WordPress Comments?

Simple… To get backlinks. Backlinks tell google that a particular site may be relevant. The more relevant google thinks a site is, the higher up in the resuilts the site may appear. (Yes, I said ‘may’ because there are other factors involved).

By leaving a comment, the spammer has an option of also leaving their website url. This URL is most likely a site that the spammer is currently promoting. Now he or she has a new backlink pointing to their site.

How Did They Find Your Blog in The First Place?

They scraped it… Sounds fancy huh? Not really. it’s just a search query that you can enter into google. All you need to do is find something that many wordpress sites have in common (a footprint it is called). Example, Most wordpress sites say “powered by wordpress” in the footer of the theme, therefore if we wanted to find a list of wordpress blogs with the .edu extension, then we could enter the following into google:

site:.edu “powered by wordpress”

Now we could manually visit each result and leave comments on each blog. However, that would take months to get a few hundred backlinks, so yes you guessed it, there are tools to automate all of this.

…and that’s how they find your blog.
Unfortunately, once they build a list of blogs, they re-use the list over and over again with different spun user names. They even sell and trade the lists with other spammers. It’s big business. kind of crazy huh?

Prevent WordPress Comment Spam

Sooo the first step to prevent comment spam, is to prevent them from scraping your blog in the first place. Remove all of the footprints.

• Remove the ‘Powered by wordpress’ from the footer
• Re-word other footprints – such as the “Leave a Reply” footprint on the comments section
• Re-word the field titles (also on the comments section). i.e., “name (required)”, “Mail (will npt be published)”, etc
• Browse through your site and re-word or delete other footprints so they can not be scraped

Other Things To Do

There’s a free plugin called Akismet that comes with wordpress. Definately activate that and sign up to get your access key. It’s free and it really does work.

You could also set wordpress to close comments on older posts. Depending on your blog, you may not want to do that though. If you decide to do it, you can find the option in your administration area under “Discussion Settings”.

Recaptcha? Nah, I don’t even bother with that anymore. It’s not even worth annoying the real humans that are visiting your site. It used to be OK for added security, but now the spammers’ scripts will actually send racaptchas over to some company in asia that will manually solve them. It’s only like $6 bucks for every 5,000 solved. so very inexpensive. Just change your footprints and get akismet. :-)

Well I hope this post helped you understand a little more about comment spam and how to protect your blog from it.