Among all of the daily tasks and a problems that bloggers have to deal with, spam comments are probably the most annoying.
First of all, once you see that little word cloud in your WordPress dashboard saying you have some new comments to approve, you feel excited!
Then you are devastated to see they are just a bunch of spam comments!
Nothing better than anchor text named imaginary people leaving idiotic generic comments to make your day better.
Save yourself the time and bloggers the annoyance.
Tips to identify garbage spam comments
Hello… My Name is “Michigan Teeth Whitening”
I have yet to meet anyone in person that has the name of a product, so when I see someone commenting on a blog with the same concept, it's a clear sign for deletion. It's one thing to post as your blog / site name, which is perfectly fine… but when you start using long tail keywords for your blog common… c'mon son!
My Face is a Big Blue and White Symbol
There is nothing worse than talking to someone face to face and to have them looking around and not directly at you. This is how some of you might feel when you you see a big blue and white gravatar button as someone's picture. It's just like on Facebook… if they don't have a picture, you aren't going to friend them. No approved comment for you!
“Thanks for writing this amazing blog post!”
As much as I'd like to think that I'm one of the greatest writers in the world, I know I'm not… but some of my blog commenters seem to think so. “Wow, great article! I have been searching all day and found your blog post. This is exactly what I was looking for”… Gee thanks, I was quite impressed with my post as well… oh wait, another spam comment!
This Gibberish Doesn't Even Make Sense!
Sometimes you will even get blog post comments that just don't make any sense at all. Sure, I understand that you probably have some blog readers from other countries reading your stuff, but still… try and make your sentences at least readable so they make sense. Again… right in the trash bin!
Guess what blog comment spammers?… Real bloggers aren't that stupid!
Sure, there are millions of garbage blogs out there for you to spam and gain backlinks from that will really never end up sending link juice back to your little site… make sure to continue wasting your time with these tasks and saving the real bloggers of the world a second from having to delete your post.
For any “real” commenters out there who might be falling into any of the categories above, it's time to step up your game and fix these corrections!
Provide value, not another peice in the trash bin!
What are your thoughts on this?
Actually WordPress blogger suffers more from such comments. These are weird and by default WordPress don’t have a feature to stop em.
Its not only WordPress blogs. I’ve faced more horrible spam comments in my Joomla site as well.
Thanks to WordPress, at least, it has many plugins that can fight against them.
Everyone loves to comment on wordpress blogs because they are all over the place and continue to rank well and earn page rank over time. Some of the worst sites out there are ones that have been forget about, yet left their automatic approval for comments on and continue to get abused every day.
I have to say that it seems not to matter where you go anymore, whether it be a blog or a forum, there are going to be spammers. I have the same issue on my website and it is very annoying and difficult to keep up with. Many of the forums I look forward to getting direction and information from are really having a hard time with spammers. One thing I have noticed also is that many spammers will copy almost word for word what someone else had already commented. As if you won’t notice. I can’t blame you for being annoyed as I feel the same way and it’s such a waste of time having to try and delete them all!
Yes, I hate to check comments to see if they are spam or not. It takes a lot of time actually. They are spamming manually so no plugins could detect them.
It’s not only wordpress sites that have issues with spam comments, others sites have this issue.
But come to think of it, This spam comments of a thing is just getting too much for bloggers to bear. Take my blog for instance, I receive spam comments daily and thanks to the plugin I use which filters it aside. Some folks will insert some annoying keywords in the space meant for their names,while others will put in their website URL, and then say: wow, this is awesome, the exact post I’ve been looking for all day.
Come on, we should grow up and stop all such comments. Before you comment, make sure you read the post carefully and put in meaningful comment if you must. But if you don’t have anything meaningful to say, you can better still forget about commenting.
I think I have to start screening comments on my blog, because this is becoming really annoying.
Any way, thanks Zack for this awesome tips.
Lol, nice post Zac. you have mentioned everything in your post. i liked 3rd point the most. i always get these kind of comments on my blog (specially the 3rd one). this is a serious problem. people are doing everything to get their comment approved so that they can take benefit from it and this is not good for Blogging. this shows how desperate people are, to get backlinks.
Yes, the quite generic ones are very annoying. At least make us think for a few seconds whether or not your comment provides any value or not!
Hi Zac,
Now i won’t appreciate this post otherwise you might mistake me as another spam commentator. Ha-ha :p
I prefer having just 1 genuine comment over tons of comments filled with unnecessary flattery & recapitulated ideas. When people comment this way, one thing is for sure – all that they care about is just getting a back-link. Nothing else!
Love how you have written this article (this is genuine praise!) 😀 The points addressed are all sure-fire ways to get marked as spam and sent to trash.
Building on the poor grammar “doesnt-make-sense” point, ive noticed many spam comments lately appearing in my moderation box that make sense but the spelling is all “bakcwadrs like tihs”.
Thanks, appreciate it! I could feel the emotion and humor as I was writing it!
HAHA, this happens all the time and all we gotta do it do what you said while hope to see less spam comments as you shared this great article.
Thanks – Ferb
I strongly agree with you Ferb. Great article!
is *
Glad you like it. Spam comments are really annoying not just spam comments and email is another place where you can get even annoy by spammers.
What do you mean you are the greatest writer in the world? I thought I was! Seriously comment spam is so annoying, and it consumes valuable time. I don’t use a real picture of myself when commenting, but I like my little gravatar. I think it is still better than the no gravatar default image. I do get some legit comments from people without one, but more often than not it seems the spammers do not have use one.
Spammers are becoming smarter. Most of them have gravatars set. So no gravatar won’t directly mean spammers.
Other side, new visitors who are not yet tech savy, often do not have their gravatar. Yes, most of them do not leave any comment, but if somebody left, it is genuine comment, though no gravatar.
So, I agree with you Ray that we may get legit comments from readers who do not have gravatars.
I hate when commenters don’t have a gravatar, but if the comment is still good I will approve it. Seeing posts with no gravatar just doesn’t look good when you are reading through the comments.
Hi Zac thanks for your funny point of view. I am a French guy and be sure that it is exactly the same in France and Europe… Only the words are different but the spam spirit remains the same 🙂 It’s an endless fight, but hopefully some tools such as askimet or ComLuv allow to filter some of them!
Anyway, thanks again for making me smile today 😉
Spammers world wide! I wouldn’t want to think that anyone was missing out on all the fun! 😛
Wow thanks for bringing up this great post Zac. I was just looking for this information all day 🙂 Great post!
Just kidding…..
As a blogger I find it SO annoying to see these kinda comments. Although, thanks to commentluv, I put these kinda comments in moderation, still it is a pain to have to delete them! I don’t understand why would someone have “get facebook friends” and “uk seo services” as their name! How would people call them at home?!
Anyways, seriously thanks for bringing this up Zac. I honestly hope some of those spammers repent and get a life!
Haha, very funny!
I use commentluv as well. It’s a great tool for improving comment quality and moderation. Glad you liked the post, thanks!
Hahaa… The most entertaining was “Your blog had to be ranked much higher in first page but the dumb search engines do not know the value. You made my day, it was exactly what I was searching for”.
That chap seems to be more smarter than the search engine to determine which post should come to the first page.
However, after we have commentLuv and GASP premium in it, all those automated spammers vanished for my blog. Living a peaceful life 🙂
On the contrary, the next kind of spam problem I’m facing is when I make comments. I was using one email address to comment on every blogs. Don’t know why Akismet thought I was a BIG Spammer. It started to catch my comments into spambox directly. Many of my comments died even without the moderator could notice. However, I’ve solved this problem as well and now living in peace!!
If a blogger ever wanted to raise their self esteem, all they need to do is approve all of their spam comments!
I’ve seen legitimate blog commenters go into my spam folder as well. Usually happens to a few people once or twice per day on my sites.
Suresh, I have a similar issue with one of my blog sites – when I use that email to leave a comment it kept getting into the Akismet spam box immediately – may I ask what you did to resolve the issue please?
Thanks, Pratish
Mostly comment spammers can to promote there products, for example they write ” hello admin! Your page is missing SEO bla bla bla”. Most often as you have wrote here they comment “Nice article dude”, I think they only want links back to their product by hook or crook 😉
Hi Zac – good article… almost had me tempted to replace my screen name with dodgy dental product and put a grinning face as my gravatar just for a laugh… then thought I’d probably go straight to the spam bucket so decided against it! 😉
Have to say the spam has become a lot more manageable with akismet (although still get hundreds in the spam box each week regardless). I find you do have to be careful about just deleting Akismet marked spam though – have seen quite a few of my regular commenters get caught for some reason so it’s worth spending some time skimming through the spam box before hitting the Empty Spam button!
Have you found it more time consuming to have to browse through the spam box or does it save time overall to use akismet? Also how do you identify your regular commenters, I mean I feel like once I have enough consistent commenters it would be so hard to do this…
It’s just so damn easy to catch comment spammers – that I sometimes wonder why they waste all that time and effort doing it.
Unless they’re using software like X rumer or Scrap ebox to post 1000s of comments, they’re not really going to get any links…
It is just awesome stuff i have ever read about Blog Comment . I liked your third Point. People always tries to get backlinks easily without reading any blog post. This is really a serious problem.
Thanks a lot for writing this. It was funny to read it and I found a mistake I have been doing for a long time… the gravatar thing. Luckily I fixed it yesterday, so if this comment is accepted to the page you will hopefully no longer see that stupid face, but my gravatar! Thanks again for the article which brought a big smile to my face as I read it.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Good move on the gravatar change.
I get those annoying spam comments as well and sometimes it’s really a pain in the ass to sift through the comments to see which aren’t spams and which is real. This is because they write their spam comments in a way to make their comment seem genuine.
I guess we all have to deal with these spammers if we want our blog to have that clean environment.
Thanks for the great article, Zac.
I see your avatar all over the place! Good branding with the Google colors on top. Makes your avatar stand out and be remembered by all who see.
Well, I have a strategy that may seem weird to some about spam comments. That is to edit them and publish. Enjoy on spammers work.
Occasionally I will edit the comments if they are gibberish and look like they were intended to be useful. I won’t clean up any comments that are promoting garbage sites and just trying to get the link.
Spam truly annoys me to no end, with Disqus I have managed to cut down on much of it and with my moderation rules of holding any comment with a URL in it, I know at least almost no spam will get to publication directly and have to be deleted after the fact. Often spam comments aren’t very good (worth editing and approving). Even in Disqus people are building profiles with stupid keywords as name, this even further shows the spam but it is less, the fact that the comments are not dofollow means fewer spammers target Disqus blogs.
It would be interesting to see people start using their Google+ accounts instead of Gravatar… hmm Google… get to work on it!
Oh, i felt not very comfortable right now. Who knows maybe I’m the one from that category (but it was not my purpose). Akismet plugin rules. True, it always fishes out most of the spam comments on my blog.
lol…Every comment left on this article is really long…longer than usual ones….because People afraid that you will classify them also as a spammer.
From beginning to end I enjoyed reading it…really a unique article.
Now dont trash my comment as a spam.
haha thats funny
My blog used to get such Spam Comments almost Daily 5, some with The Focused Keyword,Saying thanks and Saying that they will visit regularly wile some with totally irrelevant Comment, Thanks to Akismet now such comments goes directly to spam Folder, But Akismet Makes Makes sometimes as it Detects Genuine comments As spam but that’s very rare
Lots of quality commenters still get sent into the spam folder. Just as we have to weed out the spam, we have to save the real comments as well.
Hi Zac,
My name is Gabe Johansson (dot com) and I have been searching all day for this amazing post all day. It’s the greatest post of all time… of all time! Plees czech out my site.
LOL
I have been rarely getting spam comments with Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin and Simple Trackback Validation which is great. Thankfully I have been getting enough real comments from my list that I don’t get super excited, only to be let down by a spammer lol
Thanks for this,
-Gabe
CAPTCHAs are always a great way to greatly reduce spam too.
I thought about making a joke with a thirty-five word weight loss name, but couldn’t do it. I did get a chuckle, though, because I have seen all those examples so many times. It is hard to believe that spammers waste their time. Wonder how to turn the tables on them easily???
Report their garbage sites to Google… haha. Too bad it doesn’t work. Even worse than the spammers are the scraper sites that steal your content and still manage to get PR2-PR4 rankings.
Hi Zac,
Thanks for telling us what to look out for. I must admit I was so happy when I saw my first comments that I “not spammed” a couple. Later that day I’m emailing with a friend and I mentioned a comment left by a company name and that’s when she told me it’s spam so the feeling of excitement was over quick 🙂
I have taken a minute to read what they say and like you said it makes no sense at all 🙂 Thanks again for sharing this. Enjoy the rest of the week.
Thanks for reading. It’s always nice to see people comment on our sites, even if their names are “las vegas design services”! 😛
Too funny Zac. When I get #2 I do a fake happy dance in my head and dance my finger right over to delete. Ha ha on #3, once I thought, well I may not get it but somebody, somewhere will. I’ve since then figured out that gibberish is just gibberish no matter what country it comes from =). Thanks for the post. As usual very good, and that’s no gibberish.
I was totally unaware of the facts mentioned in this article, which lead me to approve several comments like, saying thank you , good work, keep it up and all. But, now it would be a easy for me to identify the real spammers….
Cool, glad you found it helpful!
This is really happening with I do comments or the people comment on my post. Spamming is very common to all especially comments that are only saying thanks and then here comes there sites. So true!
When i created a blog for the first time , i had sleepless nights. Dreaming about how my blog will reach everyone and gaining more and more comments.
But after one month i got 300 comments out of which 250 is a spam.
Thanks for sharing your post ! Have a great year 🙂
Spammers love new blogs with no anti-spam comment plugins enabled.
Fortunately there is the great commentluv plugin. Setting up it well can avoid those kind of situation. ( fake name, too short comment…)
Hi Tom, CommentLuv is really great which can block spam comments via their names, too short comment like you said and another great tool to get less spam comments is Askimet. These are 2 really great tools and everyone should definitely try it out.
Thanks – Ferb
I agree. I’m a big fan of commentluv too.
Sometimes I wake in the morning and yes that feeling hits me. However my blog is so new that is what I get 90% of the time. So that feeling of happy happy joy joy has just left the building. But hey it does have this entertainment value to it and no we are not stupid.
One thing I noticed was when I closed commenting down for their favorite target it helped lower my spam amount.
Thanks for letting us all know we are not alone. 🙂
Tim
Spam is a common trend we will all share 😛
Agreed with your points Zac,
What I really feel is due to these spammers some real and genuine commenters too suffer.
Hi Zac,
Yeah, a comment left by a product like “Teeth Whitening” or “Professional SEO” pretty much guarantees the person is refusing to put any effort at all into participating in your community. It’s a shame because making a legitimate comment is so much more interesting and, of course, gets you so much closer to the connection you really seek. Bottom line: there are no shortcuts to community. Spam is a clumsy attempt to communicate, and a shortsighted one, since you’ve lost the opportunity to take this or any other conversation to the next level.
I once had a friend named “Teeth Whitening”… then I deleted him! Yea, it’s rare to see people getting away with such tactics these days, especially with such generic terms.
Rreally good post , but I guess WordPress users , can use Akismet , it detects and pulls down almost every spam comment. I recieve no spam comment since I upgraded to Akismet premium. 🙂
Oh yes Zac,
We do like comments for social proof but spam comment is what no one wants.
Spamming on my blog has drastically reduced with GASP built in commentLuv Premium. However, some few still find their ways through somehow but I don’t give them a smile.
One other thing I hate that looks spammy are these faceless commenters. Gravatar is free yet most of us don’t use it.
Another thing I hate are comments by product names or town names. I get them deleted so fast if they really don’t add huge value.
Spammers beware!
Consider that spam comments is the way to separate the good people and bad spam people.
I dono how to get rid of those spam comments i get on my blog…though i have installed Aksimet plugin in my blog…Yeah Delete is the correct button for those comments.
On my WordPress blog I use Akismet to stop the spammers. Most of the time that plugin does the job for me. However, I also find some of the spam comments rather amusing. I sometimes scroll down an skim them before I deleting. At times the spammer’s creativity or lack of is able to cut a smile on my face.
But basically spammers are annoying.
Hi Zac,
I do like comments on my blog but I hate it when someone leave 1 line comment with keywords. Spam comments are now in control with GASP built in commentLuv Premium.
Thank you!
As you rightly put it, almost all bloggers are happy when they find comments to moderate. Great share of disappointments sets in when most of all the comments are spam-filled.
It’s really annoying.
The irony is that many of the comments on this much-needed subject are exactly the types of comments that this post is complaining against. Some people will never learn, right? 😉
It is a good thing you wrote this post and not me. I don’t think I would have been able to refrain from calling those spammers a few 4-letter words. I hate spam. I have a very niche blog and get very few comments, so when the email comes in that I got a comment I usually get excited… only to find out it is a darn spammer. Ugh!!!!!
Zac I could not agree with you more. That excitement you feel when you get that email saying you have a comment only to find a string of URL sales pitch materials that have absolutely nothing to do with your post. I will say this, it really feels good when it is someone that really gives a damn or has some great information that they want to share with you and your audience. Anyway thanks for the post
I actually use a very effective plugin (akismet) that does a heck of a job filtering out the garbage spammers deposit!
But to your point it is ‘deflating’ to see a comment pending and think, this is a great, only to find out its spam!
The above plugin has worked wonders for me to dramatically reduce any spam getting through!
Great topic and obviously an issue that effects every blogger!
TJ
Just let the spammers waste their time and money and maybe 50 years from now and they don’t get anything back from their spammy backlinks they will stop.
This post is pretty funny Zac. I love the “Hello… My Name is “Michigan Teeth Whitening” part. This makes me remember my childhood days in the internet.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Humor goes a long way when it comes to spam!
Someday you have to have a sense of humor when dealing with the droves of SPAM!!!
Spam comments made in order to promote or market a company’s products and services are really very irritating. Nothing can be as genuine as someone praising your post and at the same time thinking that bloggers are fools to get carried away by the appreciation. Like we do not know what we are good at?
These are the real spammy comments. And one more could be providing irrelevant blog link. I am a real commenter but my face is big white and blue symbol, sorry for that, will upload one soon.
I definitely understand where you are coming from especially with comments like ” Great post! You really made my day! You’re a great writer! ” Then of course, the nonsensical comments that start with 8 different random letters, a rack of commas, and exclamation points. Haha.
Before activating Akismet I used to get hell lots of comments saying that my blog lacks traffic and they will help me out. It was annoying me, even after activating it didn`t stopped.
I installed Grow map plugin, and now I get few spam comments. Most of them say same what a spammer says.
Now, they`re not letting contact us form even!
~@Khjaamoin1
Spot on, I had a similar experience just today 33 comments? all spam, luckily wordpress has Askimet and other safeguards, but heck you’d think these people would know it is futile to leave spammy comments
!
The most common I find is the quick “thanks for posting this” …it’s like “do you even take the time to read what I said?” Just one time I’d like to see a blog post that says “I’m here saying thank you just so I could build a link…really I didn’t read this, have not interest in what you have to say, thanks for the PR 6 link I built..now I’m off to copy and paste this same comment on another 500 blogs”
Yea, those ones are pretty annoying and common.
hi there zac. i am also receiving the same comments. hehehe and i erase them automatically. good thing i changed my avatar otherwise i would belong to spammers Big Blue and White Symbol. i think anti spam plugins could minimize spammers though they may not entirely eradicate them
ha nice, good move on the change with the profile picture!
Hi Zac Johnson !
Thank you for your nice ideas. your ideas are really helpful for me to improve my blog. you definitely raise some right point here which are common phenomenon but we blogger need to take care on blog spam. two month before i was suffering from spam comment, some one post spam comment in my post and got more than 100 comments regularly then i blocked comment but your ideas are benefitial for every one newbies.
Seriously,that’s very true and a great post there. I just hate these spam comments on my blog.I have tried to use Akismet,but it doesn’t help much.
Few days back, I received a notification showing “9 unapproved comments” and I was very excited.
But when I logged in to my WP account, I saw 4-5 of them were spam comments. From that moment, I started using plugin to eradicate spams from my blog.
A generic problem among all the blog owners. Getting lots of spam comments with long tail keywords and URLs. That’s really annoying, but having a blog and managing it is not an easy task we have to face it, if we are in this field.
Its my personal view while blogging relationships are formed if we write a blog we wait for our readers to make a fruitful comment or suggestion which in turn start a process of learning, enhancing and moving forward but by these spammers without knowing the subject or proper grammar leave commentw which we do not want to read.
Thanks for a great share
I would like to thank Akismet plug-in, most of the time this tool filters the spam content in my WordPress blog. Blogger’s spam detector also works fine but I guess Akismet works better than blogger’s spam filter.
Hahaha.. I was amazed by the heading of this line.
It’s all about the “HEADLINE” baby!
Sometimes I wonder why these spammers even bother? What webmaster in their right mind would approve this garbage? Unless they are total novices, perhaps. But how helpful are a bunch of links from PR 0 blogs? #unexplainedmysteries
There’s always going to be money made from garbage seo / link building services.
The Premium versions of both Akismet and CommentLuv can help reduce the amount of spam, or at least give you the ability to filter through the posts to see if any “real” commenters got dropped in the trash by mistake.
However, every once in awhile one of those “Great Post. I have added you to my regular reader list” comments slips through and needs a manual heave-ho.
So many people miss the mark when it comes to commenting etiquette. And I’m not just talking about spam comments. Those are annoying and a real pain to deal with.
But almost as bad are the real comments where the commenter doesn’t add one bit to the discussion. I just wish they would at least try to leave something constructive.
But alas, spam comments aren’t going anywhere, so we’ll be dealing with them as long as we run a website.
Totally agree… even with real profiles and faces, a simple thanks is good enough, but it takes real commenting to get the discussion going.
I love comments and when I notice it’s all a bunch of SPAM I truly get disappointed. I hope as I gain more experience this will ware off, but for now I truly have no interest in meeting people who have the word show, selling or cold calling in their name – really, who are you?
I have started deleting these comments and sometimes people even ask good questions however they use a bogus email address… just funny!
Thanks for sharing – Isaiaha
Me too handle lots of spam comment on my blog. Seem that the amount of spam have been reduce once I installed caphca plug in, it’s good for combating spam
Spam is a pain in the a… Yet there are some tools that you can use to fight automatic submission of spam… yet dealing with manual posting is a lot difficult. Yet this is the business with online activities.
Haha Zac, it looks like you have had enough of those spammers!
I know man.
Same with me, I am so tired of those spammers.
I don’t get it. They will never win that way!
Google has devalued blog commenting juice so much now anyway it’s not even worth it.
Thanks to all the latest plugins like comment luv, we dont have to deal with all the spammy comments anymore.. More over they do all the things for us..
Bloggers like me just want to update the blog, and just want to forget and do the rest of the things to our blogs.. its not that we cant do it ourselves, but it just takes time to save the good ones aside and do..
True and it’s a very common problem that every famous blogger has to face. It takes a toll and we have to waste a good amount of time in identifying and deleting them.
I am a new blogger and initially got very few comments so i was publishing them all and thought why other bloggers don’t do this, but after 1 month i realized that it is too annoying and sometimes i don’t check my comments awaited for moderation for weeks
This, I am pretty sure most of the bloggers (including me) would get in their comment list- “Wow, great article! I have been searching all day and found your blog post. This is exactly what I was looking for”. You suddenly feel “Oh, great! They searched the web and they feel that my article is really great. But when you think of it for the second time, then you are like oh! its just a spam…. But at the same time I have seen some bloggers who have approved it. May be out of being innocent to the fact that its just spam (happens with newly started bloggers).
Some spam comments are funny, though.
The other day, this guy or gal lectured me on my bad grammar. Their comment was full of typos. It gave me a good laugh.
I don’t usually waste my breath or energy when I see spam. It will always be around, anyway.
English majors and their spelling corrections…
Oh no, it was a spammer.
Spamming is very common in the web because they used it as a way of getting back links for their sites. They must know that it is now risky to do this technique as Google hates it and will never allow you to ruin the credibility of the search engine.
Thanks for sharing! Yes, the spam comments will hurt my blog SEO. But I plan to use commentluv with auto approval. How about his idea? Will my blog fulfill with spams?
WordPress don’t have a system by default to stop spam comments but it have some awesome plugins to stop such spam comments. I prefer Akismet to install to stop and deal with spam comments.
You can also try improving the anti-spam plugin such as “Captcha” or a paid commenting plugin call Commentluv.
Zac, there is nothing more depressing than logging in ads seeing those kinds of spammy comments in your ham folder out of all places. And when legit comments end up in your spam folder it takes time to sieve through them trying to find the legitimate comments that have made it there.
Akismet is great but it has it’s flaws. I’ve been using the Disqus commenting system for a short while now, and the most amazing thing is I haven’t seen any spammy comments come through.
Quite annoying. I use commentluv on bloggingtips.com and been using intensedebate on zacjohnson.com. Though I will update to commentluv on both when I have the new design in place.
I have 22 blogs that I have to manage daily relating to spam comments, it’s a waste of the spammers time as well.
Congrats on such a nice portfolio of sites!
Hi, the amount of time i must waist on deleting SPAM comments. Unbelievable. My cousin this, my Iphone that, your the best writer I have ever seen. I don’t know how they think anyone will approve their comments really. It laughable really. Great blog by the way! I’m thinking about Commentluv Premium for my car valeting site just to help stop the SPAM
You will probably pay for the commentluv premium version right away just with the time it might save your from moderating spam comments.
What I fail to understand is how these spammers think that they will get away with such comments. Unless the blog has been abandoned, most bloggers are going to delete spam comments anyway. But so right about these comments, really hate them.
They only need a small percentage of comments to stay up to keep their clients happy. Most of them are paid on a low hourly basis for the manual submission work.
Thanks, glad you liked the post and found out about akismet.
Well after reading this article,i would rather be hiding my face because i do some of the above mentioned things LOL,
And yes,you said it right,bloggers aren’t that stupid to let spammers get the benefit either.
Hey Zac,
I have been getting a large amount of spam coming from Facebook. I am not sure if there is a way to stop this specific spam or not?
It is always a let down to see a large number of comments, only to find 95% is spam.
Comment spam on your blog from facebook users? I haven’t seen much of this yet. I do get a lot of “fake” facebook people requests.
Comment moderation is always a time consuming and a tough process in deciding which comment to publish and which are spams. Sometimes I feel that to publish all comments to save my time But thats strange i know. Thanks for the tips.
Depending on the blog, sometimes it’s better to just turn off the blog commenting function. Usually this is best with small niche sites that are for making money rather than generating discussion.
This is an awesome post – wait do not spam me please! LOL – I am a real commenter and even I have the chance to use software to spam great blogs I won’t – it won’t bring results!
What I do – I open a notepad or any word document and write my comment first after reading an awesome post – run an eye and review, I don’t want to get embarrass with my typos.
You know what – even my blog has no huge traffic for the time being, I still received bunch of spam comments every single day so I am not excited when I received comments for moderation in my inbox. I implemented a strict rule – generic comments are spam!
I don’t waste my time so I won’t spam! – Spammers read this! If you want better results, read, read, learn, and learn more – then comment for backlinks and referral traffic!!!
Anyway – don’t they think the spam folder enjoy keeping their spam comments after thrashing it?
Spam comments might deserve to be sent on great blogs – but only inside great blogs’ bin!
See you. I enjoy this post and I hope my comment makes sense, at least a little LOL 🙂
I’m working with a client now who was confused their ranking is suffering with a strong link profile. After filtering out about 90% was pure spam, or quality content on ridiculously spammed pages. It’s not easy telling a client the money they spent last year was a complete waste.
It’s amazing the amount of spammers that you can find today. The funny thing is that these people do not think you’re going to realize it, what otherwise is insulting. In my early days I had to deal with this problem, and the worst thing is the time you invest in eliminating these junk comments. Some of the bloggers to whom I support and help, report they are receiving on average 10 to 15 of such comments daily. Luckily, there are some plugins that helps us fight spam like Spam Free WordPress, to name one.
Hate those spam comments! It does make me laugh too when I see “love this article, you have taught me so much here!”. Any comment that doesn’t give any mention of what I have talked about in my post does straight into spam. It does surprise me though that some of these comments arn’t even meant to be spam, and people have actually written them themselves. You are right – these people need to up their game! I have a spam filter on my blog, but I still need to trawl through that every now and then as frustratingly sometimes a real comment gets thrown in there by mistake!
I get tons of spam on my blog and just like your post stated above, you can usually tell by either the keyword in the name box or by the comments, which tend to be either very generic in nature, or completely don’t make any sense at all.
What I’ve done is that I close off comments on posts older than 14 days old. If the comments are generic and the link the poster uses goes to something I feel is legit and worthy, I’ll go ahead and approve it, but more often than not I do not.
You have to remember that these spam posts are done by software programs and this post you wrote, although valid, is not something that a lot of these spammers will ever see.
Corrisa
Ohhhhh. That means I am not the only only in this world suffering from huge span comments. Each day I’ve to spend considerable amount of time in deleting those stupid comments.
Of all the comments that I receive on my blog, more than 50% are just spam.
This is so true. I hate nothing more than having to wade through all those “Teeth whitening”, Viagra, Cyalis, make money fast-Spam comments. A friend of mine asked me if I could do a website for him. Sure, why not? But now, after nearly 1.5 years, I have to check more spam-comments than on my own websites together.
And it’s more than annoying having a comment in english when your blogpost was german and the comment has nothing to do with the post…..
I also hate spams ( usually everyone ). What I simply don’t understand is that, bots are able to comment on my blog even if I have GASP. I am not using askmit, but I don’t think that Askmit can prevnt bots from commenting.
I own a wordpress site and all the comments I have been getting is like, Thank you for this great post or what a wonderful topic.. Like as if they havent even read any of my content.. Is there anyway I can stop all this spam comments its really hard work deleting it all the time..
Hi,its an awesome post,I get so many spam on my blog and as you said above in your post , you can tell by the comments, which tends to be very generic in nature.You tips to find garbage spam is on of the best and its really true that there is nothing better than Anchor tags.Thanks to share this info with us.
nice article, I receive a lot of spam comments with links or fake names. Its really waste of time reviewing them all..
I had to turn comments off on blog posts that were about a month old to stop the huge amount of spam comments that were being posts on them.
I use Akismet and GASP and it used to help but I have noticed a rise in spam getting through so I’m assuming that people are finding ways to get around them now.
Comments on blogs to me are a two-edged sword; if you have the comments open then you are susceptible to spam, have them closed, and it’s difficult to establish the reach of your content other than the faceless stats that Google Analytics produces.
I blog regularly for my company, but due to the swathes of spam, comments are routinely ‘closed’ as soon as the posts are published. I’d love to be able to have the two-way conversation with my readers, however conversely, I don’t have time to moderate comments and remove the spam. It’s a shame really.
That’s right I hate it I have a blog and I get people posting advertising information about their business or offering their services and even posts in Russian and other languages that we cannot approve because we can’t even read them. Good topic! Thanks.
I agree with most of what you said on this article, the rest I don’t. I don’t really care if you approve this comment or not but I’m sure my point will still be relayed to you, which is really what matters most. Yes, I agree that most commenters are just visiting posts just to get some backlinks but then again didn’t we all started that way? link building and stuff is standard to promote our site and we all started out without any connections/backlinks at all..I agree if you thrash comments which doesn’t make sense and generic ones but bloggers, especially established ones, delete even comments that make sense as long as they do not agree with the comment or do not approve of the site the commenter is promoting (low PR and stuff). This is outright being snobbish! If you don’t want to be criticized on then what’s the point in publishing your thoughts? Why not just keep it to yourself where no one can comment on it?
Also, I don’t get it why you need to thrash comments with the gravatar icon as image, not everyone wants a pic of them posted in a public site, or would want their own gravatar image. Or even have the time to get one before commenting. the point is, what does an icon have to do with the comment?
Last of all, why can’t you be glad that people read your posts or even visit your site? Why can’t you guys just be happy knowing that people are following your posts? I don’t think celebrities choose which fans they would like and tell the rest to forget it..and you’re not even a celebrity yet.
Spam is really, really annoying, but by using some good plugins it is manageable (thanks god!)
Nothing worse than being a new blogger, seeing those generic comments and actually mistaking them for real support and praise :(. Oh how I was disappointed when I realised I was receiving the exact same thing every day. My blog is fairly new and I still get mass amounts of comments. SO trashy! Great post though, I chuckled.
yaa oyou wrote it right.I most horrible time of the day for me is when I open my Spam COmments to delete.They are very annoying and even good bloggers are doing it just with the intention of getting links.
I think , this is the situation which will be faced by every blogger.It doesn’t matter is he/she is newcomer or well established.Deleting spams is the daily work routine fr every blogger.Thanks to Some plugins ,which really made this task easy.Thanks for nice sharing.
hahaha happens with me most of the time.;i get too many comments from payday lones hoping to see the light of the day but what i do is mark them as SPAM..gasp is the best plugin to reduce spams
Spam folder is just a nightmare and also indicate that How popular your blog is !