If you’re a new WordPress owner, you might not have set up the necessary anti-spam measures to ensure your website notifications and even more annoying – emails aren’t spammed every day with comments varying between attempting to look legitimate, to plain obvious bot spam.
Why do people use bots & software for WordPress Comment Spam?
When you add your comment to a website with a profile built up including your name, business URL & email address. It adds an additional backlink to your website and can be part of a successful link building strategy if done right. It should not, however, be the main source of incoming links to your website nor should you set out to leave out ‘X’ amount of comments each day as part of a strategy as Google will pick up on it and consider it spamming.
The comment spam software you see is a result of businesses and digital marketing companies looking the easy way of building backlinks to their websites and thus the comments are irrelevant random generated spam, the only thing they’re concerned with is opening up a link from your website to theirs to boost their domain authority.
How do I spot WordPress comment spam?
Here are some good average examples
A look at the first 2 comments and you might have initially fallen for thinking these were indeed legitimate comments, the quickest way to often discern between spam and non-spam is to look down the usernames, email addresses & URLs included in the profile. The bottom example, of course, has made very little attempt to mask the fact it is nothing more than a bot & obvious spam.
WordPress software will catch the majority of these and they will not appear on your site, however, you’ll still receive the annoying notifications each time to vet them & decide if they are legitimate comments each time.
How do I stop WordPress comment spam?
Stopping WordPress comment spam is fairly easy and there are hundreds of plugins designed for this simple task. There are premium versions and free versions – if your website is highly ranked and receives lots of traffic you should probably look into a premium version.
Of these plugins, the most recommended is Askimet for good reason. It does exactly what it says on the tin. It even has a ‘free’ plan should you decide their ‘personal’ plan is worth nothing as it allows you decide yourself how much you want to pay for it.
In Summary
So if you’re interested in boosting your website domain authority by leaving comments with URLs remember the following
DO
- Use your real name, a legitimate email address & website
- Leave useful comments with legitimate compliments or criticisms
- Follow other websites in your niche to build a network & comment on.
- Ensure your own blog has anti-spam software installed and is correctly setup.
DON’T
- Use Autoblog software or commenting software to spam comment links
- Set out to comment ‘X’ number of posts per day
- Comment purely for opening a link, always give feedback or give useful information. Contribute to the conversation, don’t leech.