What is WordPress Comment Spam?

You finally created your first WordPress blog and like magic you start receiving glowing comments about  your amazing writing skills, but something seems wrong. This article will help you understand what WordPress comment spam is, and how to identify when people are spamming you.

What is Spam?

I have to tell you a funny story before I answer that question. When I get to this portion of my trainings in my WordPress courses I often get confused answers dealing with a very famous “Canned Meat”, or worse. Sometimes my older students will start humming Montey Pythons “Spam” song. If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about be sure to do a youtube search for it and you’ll see, but in the meantime imagine students singing about “canned meat” and you’ll get the picture. Ok let’s get back on topic…

Spam is basically unwanted communication usually designed to sell you a product. Spam most commonly comes in your email. You know the drill. You check your email to see if your sweet aging mother responded to your email about the pictures you sent her and then… WHAMO… you have an email promoting Viagra. You Groan.

Grrrr…

Spam is litterally the plague of the internet. We all hate having to sort through 50 emails of spam to find the 5 legitimate emails we actually wanted. Unfortunately spam is not limited to email, it affects blogs to!

After about a week of starting any new blog the comments start pouring in. If you’re new to blogging you may be thinking… wow! This is so cool! I don’t even know what I’m doing, but I already have these glowing comments on my articles. Unfortunately, you are probably receiving comment spam on your WordPress blog.

What is WordPress Comment Spam?

Comment spam is what you receive a comment from a marketer wants to promote their website, products, or services on YOUR webpages. They do this by leaving a comment that offers no real value to your website and is combined with a link back to their website, product, or offer. The spam often takes the form of a glowing comment like  ”Wow, you have an amazing way of stating things so clearly. I’m going to recommend your site to all my friends”.

While that remark may sound like a glowing review worth keeping, it is in fact worthless text that was copied and pasted into your comment box.

9 Ways to to Identify WordPress Comments Are Spam

1. Keywords Instead of a Name
2. Spammy Links
3. Off Topic Dialog
4. Non-sense
5. Fake website
6. Weird email address
7. Poor English
8. Completely Generic
9. Comment is in a foreign language

The first way to identify spam is by looking at the name field. If individual commenting used the name “Buy Insurance” then you’ve probably been spammed. The name field is used to identify the person leaving the comment. What you may not already know is that WordPress asks the person commenting to also fill in their website address. When WordPress displays the comment it makes that person’s name clickable so that people can easily visit their website.

When people leave a name like “buy insurance” they are stuffing the keywords important to THEIR SITE into the name field to make their keyword clickable to their website. All that is called ANCHOR TEXT which could help their site rank better in Google for their keyword, but it is an abusive treatment of your commenting system.

The second way people spam your site is more obvious. A spammer (or robot) will leave a comment with blatant self promoting links in the comment itself. Anytime there is a link within a comment be sure you feel comfortable that it is relevent to your blog post and to the comment being left. A good rule of thumb is to only allow links within the comment if it offers value to your readers.

The third way to identify bogus comments is by noticing when comments are off-topic. Irrelevant remarks are often garbage that has been copied and pasted just to get a link back to their website.

The fourth type of comment spam is just pure non-sense. The words seem to be English, but express incoherent babble. Mark these as spam.

Fifth on the list of things to look out for is an obviously fake website listed where the website goes. Typically these comments look relevant to your site and on-topic, but have a link within the comment to some other site. Personally, I have blog setup to keep any comments with 1 link or more held for moderation. Spammers will use a fake website where they are supposed to list their site because they don’t want to get caught and flagged as a spammer.

The sixth thing you can use to identify comment spam is a weird email address. Spammers won’t use a valid email address. See #5 for the same reasons.

The seventh thing to look for is poor English in the comment. While this is not a completely accurate way to determine if the comment is spam, it can be a warning flag that tells you to take a closer look. Marketers will often hire spammers (very cheaply) in other countries to generate comments for link building purposes. When I see poor English in a comment,  I know to take a closer look.

Eighth is the completely generic comment. These are the glowing comments that sound like someone was really impressed with your amazing writing skills. They usually follow this remark up with a promise to promote your website. One way these comments can throw you off is by ending with a question like “What theme are you using?”. This type of spammer is just puffing up your ego to get their link back to your site. Don’t let the question throw you off. It’s likely spam.

Our last way to identify WordPress comment spam is one of the easiest to spot. In my experience, comments in a foreign language are usually spam. This may not be the case for your website. Especially if your site has an international influence. When in doubt look at the links. If the comment has 3 links, then it’s spam.

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