Comment spam is a nuisance just about every WordPress blog owner faces. I use the free Akismet WordPress plugin to block spam comments on my blog and my other WordPress-based websites. Akismet has blocked hundreds of thousands of spam comments from appearing on my blog and annoying readers.
One thing I’ve noticed quite a bit of lately are repetitive comments that are made by different people (or maybe even bots) that try to embed links or have keyword anchor text, and they aren’t being blocked by Akismet. Despite having “nofollow” tag attribute on all comments and in the comment section of my blog, people still think they may get some search engine benefits from posting links.
There are a couple of tell-tale signs that a comment may be spam. Of course it’s quite obvious when there are keywords in lieu of a person’s name (some people always do this though). The other thing that people try is copying someone else’s comment word for word but they add a link below the comment. I guess they assume many people will just approve the comment and not notice the link.
It’s unlikely that these comments will be harmful to a blog, but they are certainly annoying to read. Akismet is a helpful plugin, but it doesn’t always do the trick.
I use the Asismet plugin, but I found another plugin that seems to do a better job, in some ways – WP Hashcash.
Here’s the plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/
They seem to work fine together, so you can’t lose by using them both.
Too bad they won’t block people’s senseless comments though 😉
I’ve found that using the ReCaptcha plugin stops the few that slip though akismet’s filter. Google now owns ReCaptcha (http://www.google.com/recaptcha).
Making people type a captcha in every time is very inconvenient though, the WP Hashcash plugin uses other methods that work behind the scenes, and don’t make the users do anything extra.
No matter how many times you say content is king you will have a number of people using things like scrape box to get a very poor looking site up the rankings for the brief moment in time for IM purposes, before being flushed down googles toilet.
You might be amazed at what you learn from reading at forums where people who practice the dark arts of black hat hang out.
Ive seen things such as experiments where links have been blasted to peoples competitors websites from bad websites to see if it affects SERPS, by the way it did.
And I thought Domainers were people of little principle!
“Despite having “nofollow” tag attribute on all comments and in the comment section of my blog, people still think they may get some search engine benefits from posting links”
That’s because, for many sites, there is an upside for a link even with nofollow. It is a citation… and that has value even if it’s not a strong signal.