Unless you are blocking search engines from finding your website, if you have comments activated on your blog, you will receive comment spam.
Unlike email spam who try to sell you something, comments spam are trying to sell something to your visitors. Comments spams are sent with the goal to get link back to their website (also called a backlink).
There are several things you can do about it:
– not allow comments, but in that case you miss out on all the interaction with your readers
– monitor comments yourself, you can set rules for the comments, block certain keywords or IPs, send comments for moderation, meaning that you will have to review each comment manually, which is time consuming
– use a plugin that will automatically sort through your comments and place the spam comments in the spam category. These tools are not perfect but they are a real help and some of them do a really good job.
So if you don’t have time to spare moderating your comments, the way to go is to find a tool that will do most of the work for you.
Free solution to handle SPAM
SPAM Free WordPress is a free plugin that automatically creates a password for each post you make. the password is changed everytime there is a new comment. To post a comment you must enter the password that is shown to you (like a captcha).
Paid solution to handle SPAM
Akismet is a web service that detects and tracks comments spams and trackback spams.
Close to 50% of the blog comments checked by Akismet are spam.
99.5% of the trackback that Akismet checks are spam.
Akismet provides a WordPress plugin that is free for non commercial websites. When you active this plugin, each time you receive a comment on pingback or trackback, it is automatically sent to the Akismet web service. Akismet will run tons of tests on it to determine if it’s spam or not and returns a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
In fact, in May 2012, Akismet caught their 50 billionth piece of spam.
