What constitutes spam?

[jmk909er]

I am new at this and am starting to get comments on my site. Some seem to be a bit incoherent , made up or somehow generated and a couple are from a different name but from same website that are kinda saying the same thing but in a different way???

What constitutes spam? Are people leaving comments just to have a link Does anyone have any guidance or suggestions on handling this?

Thanks, Joe

 

[Linda Buquet]

You'll get more and more of that junk as your blog gets more traffic.

You can set up akismet and other spam plugins that will nip a lot of it in the bud so you don't need to deal with it. But my advice is don't approve a comment unless is sounds legit and like they really read the post. Most lame compliments about how great your content is, is just from lame link builders and spammers.

 

[AllanJames]

Another form of spam that's on the rise, probably because akismet does a pretty good job of catching Comment spam is Trackback spam. Here's an example of trackback spam received this morning .....

------------
A new trackback on the post "Copywriting How To Connect With And Motivate Your Reader" is waiting for your approval


Website : tandblekninng med laser (IP: 119.2.3.222 , 119.2.3.222)
URL :
Trackback excerpt:
tandblekninng med laser...

[...]n I got what you impart, thanks for putting up. Woh I am gladsome to judge th au[...]...
-----------------

As you can see it has all the elements we usually see in spam - poor English, no relevance to the subject etc etc.

If anyone knows of any automated way of dealing with it I'd love to hear about it as I'm having to deal with them more and more often.

 

[seanicasia]

For all the examples you've listed, they are most probably spam.

If anything looks artificial, manipulated or made up, just bin them.

Keep your user experience in mind and think in terms of "will this comment add value to the discussion?"

If it's anything other than a 'yes', trash it.

 

[DeniseTaylor]

You don't want to allow spam or low quality content on your site. Google's algorithms are sensitive to such practices and it could lead to a penalty. Do not allow people to spam your site, including link spam. It's a big no-no now.

It will get worse as you grow, but it's important to keep your site as high quality as possible, if you hope to get or maintain rankings.

 

[jmk909er]

Thanks everyone for all your comments about spam I have learned a lot. I have installed akismet on my wordpress site and it is working great and has caught a lot of spam.

 

[yanamk]

Glad that the plugin works well and filters the spam comments. I would also suggest using captcha for blog posts and maybe even user registration, if possible. I had a bad experience with spam. One day I woke up to find my forum flooded with spam posts. There were so many of them, that I simply couldn't delete them all, so I had to start all over.

Now i have a captcha thingy and it works pretty well so far.

 

[jmk909er]

Thanks yanamk, what does captcha do for me and is this a plugin?

 

[Kate1]

People commenting just to leave links is not only considered SPAM but also now it can be bad even as a backlink, since if you leave a link on the wrong site it backfires...

 

[AllanJames]

Thanks yanamk, what does captcha do for me and is this a plugin?

A 'captcha' is those highly annoying (because they are often difficult to read and respond correctly to) series of obscured alphanumerics that are use to prove you are a real person and not some sort of automated bot making the input.

On a blog it's worthwhile to used captcha's to prove the same on your comments, user registration and contact forms.

From inside your blog (goto Plugins>Add New) do a search of the WP Plugins Repository and you will find several plugins that perform this function.

 

[Pud]

I only approve comments that are obviously specifically written for and is relevant to my blog ... nothing that could be just put on any blog like "oh wow great post!".