Introduction to blog spammers
Blogs are now an extremely popular and important part of the internet where millions of people blog every day.
As blogs have evolved over the years, so has the commenting system. Now anyone can make comments on a particular blog posting.
As blog commenting has grown more popular, so have blog spammers and spam comments.
In this blog, we will spend time on the simplest format of blog spammers and why comments are a great form of feedback for your blog. And how they help the credibility of your content, what spam comments are and how to prevent them from happening.
What are blog spammers?
A blog spammer is in most cases a bot that is programmed to spam your website pages or its an actual person that indiscriminately manually or automates the inclusion of incoming links to a web page included amongst comments to blogs, forums, guestbooks, etc. with the objective of attracting search engine web crawlers at any cost, even if this risks creating spam and being penalised by search engines should they discover what is happening.
To avoid such abuse it is recommended that you or your webmaster moderate incoming comments and employ techniques or manual authorisation systems to ensure only authorised content is published.
Comments on blogs are a great form of feedback
When blogs first came around, they were simply online journals.
No one could post comments on a blog posting.
That all changed in 1998 with OpenDiary, a site which allowed people to comment on blog postings. Today every blog, whether it is remote or self-hosted, includes this choice to comment.
Commenting is great because it allows real people to tell you what they think about your form. It gives you feedback on what you are doing right and what you may need to improve. Comments can be encouraging to you and motivate you to post more quality blog messages. Or they can be constructive criticism to make you work harder to get better at writing content.
Whatever the style of comment is, it is still very useful to your blog. High numbers of comments can make a blog look credible because they show that the blog is being read by a lot of people. That is something that every blog owner wants and comments help to let them know just how many people enjoy their content.
Bad blog comments produced by blog spammers
Unfortunately, blog spammers also use comments as a way to spam. How do you know what a spam comment is? Well, a spam comment is a comment that only advertises another site or product.
If the comment seems bland/generic with a cheap link thrown in, then it’s definitely a spam comment.
Here is an example of a typical spam comment:
Of course, not all spam comments will be this blatant, but you get the point.
Fortunately for bloggers, as spam comments have grown, so have the ways to prevent it.
Here are a couple of ways to prevent blog spammer comments from even being posted on your blog.
1. Close off commenting on older blog posts
There are options for you to stop comments from being posted on any blog post. Lots of times, blog spammers will post comments in weeks or months-old posts. So, take away this opportunity from blog spammers to keep it from happening.
Most web hosting services offer this as a standard choice in the tool panel and how to handle blog spammers. If one of your posts has been up for a couple of weeks, close it up.
2. Take advantage of software offered to prevent comment spam
If you host your own blog using WordPress, you can use an option in that software to prevent blog spammers entry to your site. Even if you aren’t using WordPress, you can still use other spam comment-blocking software or plugins like Spam Karma, Akismet, and Bad Behaviour. While these are not 100 % effective, they have proven to be quite effective in preventing spam from happening.
3. Check your settings and see what can be tweaked to toughen your protection
Lots of web hosting services have settings to help prevent blog spammers’ entry to your site. If you already have a spam blocker on in your blog and are still experiencing spam, take a closer look at the settings to see if there is anything that can be tweaked to make your protection stronger.
However, if you do this, you should closely monitor your posts to make sure legit comments are not being blocked out. If they are, you might have to lighten up a bit.
4. Regularly read your blog comments
Be sure to keep an eye on your comments. Even the best software or setting can’t prevent everything, so you will have to remove comments occasionally manually on your own.
By applying the above principles, you can ensure that your blog is full of only good, quality comments, which will help your credibility tremendously.
Your challenge
Comments are a great form of communication between yourself and your readers. They help the credibility of your blog, except when spammers get hold of your blogs!
So, take some time out and check your blog post comment sections for spam write down what you see and then decide what you want to do about what you noticed!
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