How to get rid of spam comments in WordPress?
The comment Spam is the big issue that we will face as our blog begins to gain popularity in the internet industry. We will see comments full of pornography, unusual, or other spammy links in huge counts. Also, we will see fake spammy links making us think that they are linking to our article by sending a trackback. In this article we are sharing some of the most important tips, tools, tricks, and other WordPress plugins available for user to combat Comment Spam. If we don’t utilize the options I suggest, we will spend hours moderating the comments on our site. So read through to know how to get rid of spam comments in WordPress.
1. Activate Akismet
Akismet is one of the most important plugins for WordPress. We do not need to download it as it is available pre-installed with all the WordPress installation. But we do need to activate it and obtain an API key. We can find out much more about Akismet in the available Akismet 101 Guide for the WordPress Beginners. Without this, anyone have no chance against SPAM. Akismet do a great job in catching the SPAM comments. Although sometimes the good comments also get filtered as SPAM, but we can always recover them by going through our SPAM comments on a regular basis.
2. Nofollow Comment Links
One of the main cause that motivates Spammers to do comments on our site is if we have Do-Follow links available. They want to gain the link juice from our website, but we can prevent this by simply using nofollowing all comment links. By default WordPress adds up an external nofollow attribute to available all blog links, but sometimes users might have to take the route of making each link Dofollow in a quest so as to get more comments. Remember this is about quality not the quantity. I recommend if we are using Dofollow then get rid of that. If we do not have a plugin of that type sort, then this step is not for us.
3. Blacklist Spammers
WordPress allows us to blacklist the spammers by using their mail addresses, their URL, their name, or even their IP. All we need to do is to type one of the information in blacklist box under Settings ~ Discussion tab, and we will never see the comment again in the moderation.
Sometimes we are not sure whether the person is a spammer or not, so we approve their comment. But we are not satisfied. There is a box which we can see right above blacklist box called the comment moderation. So just put the words, email, URL, name, or IP and that specific user’s comments will always be getting moderated by the administrator. Also as we can see above, there is a box that has got the number 2. It is for the counting number of URLs in the allowed comment. If the number passes the value in that input box, then that comment will automatically be hold for the moderation. 2 is default number, but we can change it to make it 3 or higher than 2 to fit our need.
Note: Always choose our Blacklist wisely because each IP, word, or other value that we put in will get deleted instantly.
