Why You Should Guard Your Blog Against Comment Spam

Comment spam isn’t dead

You might have thought that after the massive changes search engines have been making to their algorithms in the past 18 months that comment spam would be a thing of the past. It should have faded into obscurity a long time ago, but for some reason it lingers on. Like a creeping vine on the side of a house, comment spam can cause a lot of problems for you from all quarters. Not only do visitors dislike seeing a bunch of spammed up comment areas on their favorite blogs, but search engines don’t like it either. In fact, having too much comment spam on your blog / website pages can lower the trust factor and authority of your website in the eyes of search engines; in Google’s case, having a large amount of comment spam on your website or blog could give the impression that you are permitting such activity and encouraging the formation or expansion of a “bad neighborhood”, something Google isn’t too keen on either.

Sadly, even for those in the best search engine positioning company circles, there is only one way to ensure that comment spam is a thing of the past on your blog  / website, and that is to completely disable comments. This isn’t always the path to take, especially if your blog is dual-purpose and is meant to promote your brand with new content as well as engage your readers to participate in discussions with you. No comments, no potential for discussion. But then again no comments means no comment spam. What’s a blogger to do? Is there a happy medium?

Keeping comment spammers at bay

If you’ve decided that you’d like to keep comments open on your blog, here are a few things that you can do to help keep the comment spam under control:

• Moderate comments yourself – If you have a smaller blog with mid to low traffic then this might be a viable option for you. This way you can read each comment that is left and decide for yourself which are spam and which are not.
• Implement a CAPTCHA – As aggravating as these things can be, they are one way to discourage some spammers. Spammers are getting smarter every day, so there is no guarantee that a CAPTCHA won’t just annoy your regular visitors into not commenting without deterring the spammers much.
• Require registration – One way to avoid getting a lot of comment spam is to require users to register before they can leave a comment. This is a good strategy to keep spammers away, but it can also keep legitimate comments away because most people don’t want to have to sign up for yet another thing they’ll have to remember the password to.
• Allow users to comment using their social media profiles – If someone has to comment as themselves (obviously names and such are visible when a user comments while logged into Facebook) there is less of a chance that comments you get using this method will be spam. Spammers do have social profiles, but they tend to be less prolific in their commenting as it draws attention to their obviously fake profiles.
• Close comments on posts after a certain amount of time – Often spammers prey on older blog posts where they are hoping their comments will go unnoticed and thus unmoderated. You can nip this in the bud by disabling comments on older posts. For example, after a post is 2 weeks old, you can cut off comments and leave only those that were posted before the cut off.
• Create a blacklist – You can use comment filters to automatically hold back or prevent comments containing certain words, or comments coming from certain IP addresses. The risk is minimal in the case of the word filters because you can set them to include words very common to spammers such as accessory brands, names of medications, or any other words and terms which are irrelevant to your brand.

Your takeaway

Comment spam is bad news, period. There is nothing good about it, and not only can it damage your reputation amongst your readers and diminish their satisfaction but it can also be bad in terms of SEO. Who needs that kind of complication? Certainly not business owners, marketers, and employees tasked with maintaining the brand’s blog or website! Taking action now to secure your blog or website against comment spam is not only a good idea, but it will leave you with one less thing to worry about, and we can all agree on the merits of that.