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WordPress comment spam is an annoying, ongoing problem that can be tackled with the help of plugins and by taking some necessary steps.
When your WordPress website gets spammed, it’s usually in the form of a comment posted by “bot”. A bot is nothing but a malicious piece of code that adds random and spam comments in your blog’s comments section. This is done through emails or through your contact form. Such comments do not add any value to your blog because they contain links to malicious websites, advertisements, and unsolicited communications.
Some sites have comments disabled on their website, while most of them don’t. If you have chosen to enable comments on your site, you are bound to get targeted by spammers. In order to stop your website from getting spammed, you need to prevent spam comments before they get posted.
Although it’s not possible to completely stop WordPress spam comments, you can work to bring down the number of such comments you receive. If you are running a WordPress site, you’ll find numerous plugins that help you successfully block or hide spam comments so that your visitors do not see them.
One of the most popular methods to post spam comments through a script or a bot. These comments are automatically posted without any human intervention. Since they are direct spam and irrelevant to the content, they’re easy to spot and filter out. A large percentage of comment spam can be attributed to spambots.
Manual CommentsSpam comments posted manually by real humans are the hardest to spot. These human commenters are specifically hired to post unique comments that usually include links. If you have ever tried to eliminate spam from your website, you should know how difficult it is to predict such comments. Mainly because they’re more conveniently written and executed compared to automated bots.
How seriously you take spam matters a lot. For many people, spam is a small problem where they get these annoying, poorly-written comments from time to time. However, it’s not that simple!
If you don’t stop WordPress spam comments, it can have a long-term impact on your website. Besides that, spam comments contribute to your website’s poor user experience. This means such comments can harm you significantly in more than one way.
Protecting your WordPress website from spam involves a number of steps:
The first and foremost step we take towards combating the comment spam problem on your site is install a spam protection plugin. This means that you can safely have the comments enabled on your site without the fear of them getting published. You also do not have to worry about manually moderating them. The plugin we use for this purpose is the most trusted in the marketing - Akismet.
Next, we turn off the anonymous comments option. Because it’s the favorite way for spammers to bombard your site with irrelevant comments.
When you have the anonymous comments disabled on your WordPress site, visitors will be asked to fill out four pieces of vital information: their comment, name, email address and website URL.
In order to disable anonymous comments in WordPress, we make it mandatory that the commenter fills out their name and email address. We do this by checking the option under Settings > Discussion.
This will not only make it difficult for spam bots to leave poor comments, but also give you a little peace of mind by helping you with automated moderation. Although you won’t be able to completely eliminate such comments from your site, this should deter people from leaving spammy comments.
Another way to stop WordPress spam comments is to restrict people from leaving comments on your site if they aren’t logged in.
To do this, we head over to the “Other” comment settings section. This is where the “Users must be registered or logged in to comment” option is checked.
To further restrict the people who can leave comments, we choose to only allow commenting from people who are logged in users of the site.
To do this, we go to the Other comment settings section. Check the Users must be registered and logged in to comment option.
In order to stop WordPress spam comments, we create a list of “blacklisted” words. These words are blacklisted because they’re commonly used by spammers. This list also includes all those irrelevant words that you don’t want to appear on your website.
Last but not the least, this option can also be used to exclude names of competitors’ products or websites.
Rarely do spam comments come without links. They almost always link out to the website that they are trying to drive traffic to. We can either ban all comments with links, or just set a limit on the number of links that a comment can contain.
Comments that have more than your set number of links will only be published after being approved by the administrator.
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No, this will help you minimize spam on your site to a great extent.
Yes, we remove all the old spam comments.
Well, for regular work, you can check our WordPress maintenance service.
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