When you first start blogging it is fairly rare that your spam box is bursting, but, as your blog becomes more popular and your RSS feed is submitted to more sites that pull from it for your blog posts, it’s inevitable that you are going to get more and more spam comments arriving on your blog.
Those that are new to blogging and who have been lucky enough to see their blog take of really quickly will know what I’m on about and the question always arises on how you deal with this spam that you are suddenly getting, do you just delete it all or sift through it?
I personally do a bit of both, OK Akismet does prove to be a good deterrent for spam, but sometimes innocent comments are put in the spam section, so my advice to most bloggers and specially those using the WordPress platform is check your spam, if you see a comment that shouldn’t be there they approve it and over time that persons comments will stop appearing in the spam box.
Also be careful what you approve, some comments can look quite innocent, but, check them for their links as these could be going to the type of sites that you really don’t want to be linked to. Also set up a comment policy on your blog and this should also help those commentators that appreciate your blog to comment in the correct way, such as using a name and not a website etc.
Spam is indeed a problem for a lot of blogs, but it’s something that all bloggers have to live with 😉
Yeah, being spammed is the thing that we have to face.. however it's one of the challenges that we have to solve.. I agree with your point of checking the spam because sometimes Akismet mistakenly regards non-spam comments as spam..
On e thing that I missed here is I never check the link from non-spam comment, where it goes so thanks for the reminder and sharing!
Hi, sometimes as I mentioned a link can look fine, but, if it is using a URL shortener for example, then check it out as it could be linking to anything!
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In regards to URL shorteners… a lot of times I use Brizzly ( http://brizzly.com ) because the Twitter based server automatically expands already shortened URLs.
BTW Karen… if you were not aware.. I actually offer a FREE short URL php script so you can host your own simple short URL site.
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I'll have to check out Brizzly 😉 Hmmm my own short URL site, I may just take you up on that 😉
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With Brizzly, you can maintain up to 8 twitter accounts…yeah, I have a few…lol
Hi Karen, nice to see you guest posting here on Nile's blog. I'm often leery about clicking on some of those links left by potential spammers. It almost feels like that's exactly what they want you to do so they can get some traffic to their sites. On occasion I have deleted the link and left the comment but that seems wishy-washy to me. It's not like I'm desperate for comments these days.
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I've "unlinked" a few in the past as well, but if the comment isn't worth spit then it's not going to go live 😉
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These days, I don't know if your blog necessarily needs to be that popular to be a spam magnet. Even my low traffic sites seem to fill up the Akismet bin rather quickly at times. Maybe it's just a keyword play or something, but spammers seem to be pretty desperate to get just about anywhere they can.
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This has really become headache Karen, its too tough to skim through all those irritating and filthy spams to find some genuine and innocent comments. Anyway, a rescue is a must. I pay care to check if some nice comments are there. Still Bad Neighbourhood threatens.
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Really good advice you shared here. Spam is very dangerous for the blog and will reduce the blog reputation. I liked your idea of comment policy and think on a way. This seems good.
Firstly, I do agree with you Nile when a site is young it seldom happen to received a lot of spam comments but when a site already has pagerank surely if you don’t use akismet of other plugin. Spam will fill your comments section. When I encounter lots of spam comments I just delete it immediately.