How to Deal with Spam Comments.

    Here is the story of my blog a few days ago. I had a half dozen of good posts on it and I was feeling like a star blogger as I was getting almost 30 comments every day on each of them. Even though I never saw a significant increase in my page views…But who cares when you get lots of comments on it. I was happy and enjoying blogging, thinking in my mind ‘Wow who gets famous so fast?’ I had all sorts of complementary comments including “You should write a book” “You should participate in top blogs awards” “You have great knowledge about this stuff”….

   However, one noon I stumbled on wordpress forums where somebody had posted that such kind of flattery comments are spam and nothing else. Within seconds, I switched my tab and checked my comments box and found that, all those comments were back linked to some spam sites and ‘offensive content’. I never in my life wanted to be associated with this kind of trash and spam, so without second thoughts I removed all those spam comments. I was pretty disappointed. I truly love blogging but this kind of things really discourages you. So, today I am writing this post for all those beginners like me who are facing the same problem. Let us begin with the ‘Types of Spam comments and how to deal with them’.

·       Offensive Comments: These comments have offensive and annoying words in it. Thank god, I never got them. But if you have do not be disappointed just delete them. Not everybody can talk or behave well, so just neglect these kinds of things. Even the big blogs get such kind of things; it is just that they put them in trash (True place these comments deserve).

·       Flattery comments: Very easy to detect, these comments usually say lots of things about us that we never are. For example (I get these things usually)

“Seems like you know a lots of things about this stuff, you are a pro, I will subscribe to your feeds”

“My friend told me about this website and sure it has lots of interesting stuff, keep it up”

“It looks like you have written a book on it, it’s just like you are reading my mind, cheers”

I stumbled on to thus page and must admit it is really great writing, I will bookmark it and visit again”

…etc…etc.

Seriously guys, I have never have written a book on single damn thing, I am not an X-man mutant to read people’s mind and as far as I am concerned whenever I hang out with my friends we have a lot of things to talk about than to recommend websites to each others…

Do not fall for these comments…Then how to differentiate between genuine and spam comments? Spammers have user names like SEO Tips, Free Party Pills, Online money fast, Click me, etc. and there links leads to spam website or Shopping, selling useless stuff, weird online marking and other trash stuff which you can easily recognize. Also, they do not have profile picture or Gravatar whereas every serious blogger has a profile picture! These kinds of comments are really annoying and troublesome for the visitors at your blog. They also put up a bad impression of your website. So, get rid of them as fast as you can but if you keep on approving them then the spammers will totally concentrate on your website, those comments will keep on pouring making your blog look like a spam station!

·       Concern Comments: These spammers put comments that tell us that something is totally wrong in our website and that they could fix it. Believe me; WordPress never makes your website look bad unless you play with its code. Here are some samples of these concern comments.

“Hey you have got a good website, the colours are good, but I noticed a problem there with IE 8, visit this link it can help you”

“You really have great skills of writing but I can see that it is unable to pull traffic, learn some SEO tips here”

“I like your theme it is really beautiful, did you make it? But, it is having a bug, just want to give you a heads up, the content is going out of the page in chrome”

Google Chrome is one of the best browsers in the world and hardly has any issues and about the traffic, you can pull traffic only by your content and not by some ‘cheap tricks’.

When you see such comments, you just go frenzy check your website’s working with other browsers or report problem to WordPress support. The real problem is the spam comment; browsers hardly interfere with the visuals of your blog unless it is necessary.

·       Short n Nice comments: Really hard to identify but can be detected by their usernames and links. They go like this “Good Job Keep it up” “I loved it, will bookmark and visit again” “Your content is so well written that I could hardly resist myself from commenting”

Why do we comment on some post? Because we tried doing what was written in the post and it did not worked, or we had some issues doing that thing, we have some doubts or we have something to add to that post. If you look carefully to those comments above, they do not resemble to the content of the post in any sense…! This is not some social networking site to put such kind of short comments!

·       Exchange offer comments: “Hey I liked your post and shared it on facebook, pls check mine too” “I feel your blog is quite interesting checkout my blog and tell me about it”

There is only one thing I can say about these comments- Pathetic

·       Links comments: These guys are really brave and put direct links on our blog like we are advertising their blog…Its up to you, if you want to advertise such links go ahead.

   WordPress provides a great plugin called Akismet; it finds spam on its own and puts it in spam box. It is up to you whether to entertain such spammers on your Blog. If you are so keen to put up these comments then you can at least remove the links associated with them (To me that doesn’t make sense as these comments are not added by readers but by softwares…) . Now if a spammer is reading this; Please stop spoiling our content that we write with such a hard work we really love our blog. Putting up such links can bring you one or two bucks but it discourages our interest, which is more valuable. Find a good job!

       If you like, this post ‘like’ it below and let me know how I could have improved it. If you have, a rage (like me) on these spammers then let me known what you think about it by commenting below.( I still get almost 20 to 30 spams daily, but thanks to Akismet and WordPress team).