Does your blog receive a lot of comments? Spending hours moderating comments and determining what is or isn’t spam can be extremely frustrating. However, allowing spam comments to sit unattended could leave a negative taste in your readers’ mouths, and they could even cause your site to rank lower in search engine results, according to Google.
While deactivating the comments section of your site is a surefire way to get rid of spam, doing so will prevent you from having conversations and building relationships with your readers. Removing comments might solve one problem… but it could also create new ones.
So, how do you accept comments without inviting spammers in to leave irrelevant ones? Read on for a deeper look at what comment spam is, where it comes from, and how you can prevent it from getting into your site in the first place.
Continue reading → What Is Comment Spam & How to Prevent it on WordPress
Comment Spam: Google Cares, and You Should Too
Community engagement is key to success for a blogger or online publisher, and that means comments. Allowing comments on blog posts encourages readers to express their opinions. It also provides an opportunity to increase your authority through conversations with inquiring minds and appreciative fans in your blogging network. Social media makes it easy to share articles, but there’s nothing quite like building a community on your own website or personal blog.
But with a growing audience comes comment spam. These aren’t words of encouragement from loyal followers or legitimate questions from interested readers. These are the comments that are a little too formal, don’t quite make sense, or are pushing payday loans and cheap prescriptions on your post about baking bread.
Continue reading → Comment Spam: Google Cares, and You Should Too