Preventing Spam Comments in Your WordPress Website

access_time October 10, 2019
by   admin
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Spam comments remain a major problem for all WordPress websites. These comments are so universal that you could even receive hundreds of such comments in a week. Spam comments can play havoc with your site credibility and search engine rankings if you fail to stem the spam comment onslaught. However, you can eliminate a vast majority of these spam comments from your website by adopting certain anti spam comment measures. We give below a few successful guidelines that would help you eliminate all unnecessary spam comments. What are Spam Comments Spam comments are the irrelevant comments posted by bots either to advertise websites or to obtain back links. Having spam comments on your site would mean having back links from spam sites and search engines like Google penalize sites that have links from such sites. We give below a few suggestions that would help you filter all incoming comments and thus combat the evil of spam comments. “Discussion” Option to Manually Moderate Comments WordPress offers you a “discussion” option that allows you to hold your comment for checking whether they are genuine or spam before they are published. Click on the “discussion” option from your WordPress dashboard and you will be redirected to a settings page where you can manually moderate the comments. You will need to enable “comment must be manually approved” option  and this will give you  complete control over all the comments that are posted and the freedom to choose if they need to be posted or not in the site.

Filter all Comments from First Time Comment Authors

Monitoring all first time comment authors would help you decide whether they are genuine or whether their intention is to post spam comments. You need to enable a section in the WordPress site that stipulates that comment author must have previously approved comment and any first time author that tries to post a spam comment then would automatically get blocked.

Do not Accept Comments Long after Blog has been Published

We know that spam comment authors only post comments on sites that have a good page rank and that too weeks after a blog has been published. To ensure that such spam comment authors do not comment on your blog, you can decide a cutoff date after which you stop accepting comments. To do that you can go to WordPress dashboard > Discussion. Under the Other Comment Settings Section, check the option to automatically close comments on articles older than —- days and fill in the number of days you want the comments to be open Blacklisting Comments from Certain IP Addresses WordPress allows webmasters to blacklist certain IP addresses from where spam comments have come previously. You can also use content, name, email address and URL to blacklist such spam authors. The method of doing this is similar to what was done for moderating comments using the discussion settings. Install anti-spam plugins WordPress offers a wide range of themes and plugins that help you protect your website against spamming and hacking while improving its overall performance. You could use the anti spam WordPress plugin “Akismet” to filter the spam comments. “Simple Trackback Validation” plugin is also useful as it filters out spam trackbacks by comparing Ip addresses of the comment author with the web server IP address, the trackback URL is referring to. Preventing spam comments then will undoubtedly be a continuous battle and you will need to configure your discussion settings in such a way that your site is immune from all such spam comments.  

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