How to Stop Spam Bots from Commenting on Your WordPress Website
You’ve decided to try WordPress for your blog. You’ve liked the idea of having a platform that is free, but you soon find out that it’s not quite as simple as you’d hoped. You discover that there are a lot of spam bots lurking on the web trying to push junk links and worthless content to unsuspecting visitors. Even worse, some of these spammers are trying to trick people into actually commenting on their blogs. In this article, we’ll teach you some techniques for keeping your comments clean and relevant.
Block The Comment Spammer
One of the first techniques you should learn is to block the comment spammer. This is the person who is trying to trick you into posting inappropriate content. They are trying to drive as much traffic to their website as possible by paying bloggers to comment on their sites and blog articles. They try to hide their true identity by using fake names, but you can always tell when a spammer is trying to game the system by their overuse of copyrighted content and keywords in their comment body. Fortunately, there are free tools like Disqus which can be used to block these types of comments before they ever reach your blog.
Use The Right Comment Policy
One of the best things you can do for your blog is to adopt a clear and concise comment policy. Before you know it, you’ll have spammers trying to game the system by leaving inappropriate or unsolicited comments. You can set a policy like: “Please use your real name, have a relevant comment, and keep it clean. It would be great to have a discussion and learn more about your blog or website, but please don’t be nasty.” This is also where you can use your discretion when it comes to allowing anonymous comments. If you feel that there is a certain group of people who would like to leave inappropriate comments on your site, you can always lock the comments down or change the policy to allow only relevant comments from certain email addresses or IP addresses (Internet Protocol). You can also choose to moderate comments and/or delete those you deem inappropriate. This will help keep your blog a pleasant place to be and foster more engagement.
Use Your Analytics
Another great way to keep an eye on the health of your blog is to use your analytics. You can set this up in Google Analytics to track every click on a blog post and see how much traffic you’re getting from specific areas of your website. For example, you can set it so that when someone clicks on the title of your blog post, they’re taken to a specific page where they can comment. Using analytics to flag up areas of your site which are performing well and ignoring those that aren’t will help you make more informed decisions about the future of your blog.
Redirect Old Comments
Once you’ve set up your blog with a working comment policy, you can start to review old blog posts and figure out ways to keep the good comments coming. After a while, you’ll realize that your comment section is being overwhelmed by spam and irrelevant queries. When this happens, you can choose to either block these types of comments or remove the blog post altogether. While it’s not always possible to go back in time and change what happened in the past, you can learn a lot from reviewing old posts.
Keeping up with all of this can be a chore, especially when you’re running a business which is reliant on traffic and the health of your blog for its very existence. Having a few trusted tools and tips to combat comment spam will help you keep up with the demands of the internet while not sacrificing quality content.