You wake up one bright morning, log in to check your mail, and have hundreds of notices about comments made on your blog.
For just a minute, you rejoice, thinking that you’ve finally gained that fame that you were seeking when you started blogging, and you excitedly log in to your blog to read the comments and see how fabulous all those readers think your blog is.
Again, that feeling of success is going to be very short lived. The chances are great that what you are going to find is a whole lot of comment spam.
Don’t feel bad. You will someday have that fame and hundreds of legitimate comments one day if you just keep blogging and promoting your blog but today, you have to deal with comment spam.
Comment spam is simply junk spam similar to junk email or spam email. Spammers just want to leave links to their scammy, spammy websites to gain exposure, and hopefully traffic.
Most comment spam will advertise sites that sell prescription drugs or things of that nature.
Dealing with comment spam in the past was a full time job. Today, however, it is much easier. Most blog software that exists today allows you to set options that make it very hard for comment spammers to spam your blog.
These settings won’t completely stop comment spam, but they will make it much more manageable.
First, if you have the option, you want to change you settings so that only people who have registered on your blog are allowed to leave comments.
This will cut out a lot of spam. The second option you want to change, if you have it, is to force anyone who is registered to post comments on your blog to type in a verification code in order to submit their post.
If you have the option to require moderation of comments, before those comments will appear on your website, you definitely want to take this option.
With that option enabled, anytime anyone submits a comment on your blog, you will receive an email, and you will have to manually approve the comment before it will appear on the site. However, if you have a high traffic blog, this can become very time-consuming.
Again, using these options will cut out most of the spam comments on your blog especially the moderation, since no comment will appear on your blog without your approval but it won’t completely stop it.
You need to make sure that you check on your blog regularly to delete any unwanted comment spam or Trackback spam from your blog. Trackback spam is Trackbacks that lead to a splog, which is a spam blog.
Now that you know how to prevent comment spam, simply go in and delete the spam comments that are already there and change your setting to prevent or slow down future comment spam.
It may take you a little while to do this, depending on how much comment spam is there, but you do want a nice clean blog that others will enjoy visiting!
