All posts by Kevin Ashbridge

About Kevin Ashbridge

I am online expert, software developer and marketer, and I help people build an audience for their website. I founded "LucrativeIM.com" as the home for top quality articles, tutorials and software specifically for traffic generation and social marketing. I care about your success!

Three Ways to Stop Spam Comments in WordPress

WordPress Help

It doesn’t take long after you’ve put your shiny new WordPress website live for the spam to arrive.

You know what I’m talking about here – the seemingly endless stream of comments left about your blog posts offering to improve your virility, or your website traffic, or seem to have been written by a chimpanzee with a poor command of English.

WordPress Comment spam example
WordPress Comment spam example

You’ve been spammed my friend.

What is “Comment Spam”?

The motivation behind spam comments is the same as email spam – getting you to visit a website to buy a product or service – but the way the spammer gets you to their site is different.

Email spam is all about obtaining your valid email address, then getting you to click a link in the emails you subsequently receive.

Comment spam is not so much about getting you to click a link. Instead, the spammer is trying to get a higher ranking for their own website in search engines such as Google. They do this by placing a valid link to their website in a comment that they leave on yours. Google indexes the  link in this comment. Once the spammer’s website ranks high in Google for a particular search term, many more people are likely to visit this site than if they had received a link in a spam email.

Two men looking at a 1950's computer
Clever Computer Programmers

You’ve got to admit, it’s very clever.

How Do I stop Spam Comments ?

If you are using WordPress as your website platform, it’s very easy to stop most of the spam targeted at your website.

Here are three different approaches you can take. To slow spam comments to a trickle, you’re best to put all three techniques into action.

1. Use WordPress’ Built-in Comment tools

WordPress comes  with a few built-in tools that make leaving spam comments more difficult. These are all available in the “Discussions” dashboard, which is under “Settings” in your WordPress Admin area.

Before a comment appears

One way to make your website less attractive to spammers is to review all of the comments before you make available to the general public. This gives you an opportunity to delete spam comments before the are published, denying the spammer an opportunity to build links back to their website.

When logged in as an Administrator user, you should see two checkbox settings in the Discussions dashboard.

(1) An administrator must always approve the comment. When this option is checked, comments to your posts will not appear until you approve them. I recommended you check this box if the number of comments left on your website is a manageable number.

(2) Comment author must have a previously approved comment. This saves you a lot of time. When this option is checked, then all subsequent comments from a particular author will be approved automatically after their first comment has been approved by you. It means you do not have to worry about comments left by people you trust.

Comment Moderation

If you choose not to auto-approve comments – a necessity if you get a lot of comments – then there are two options under “Comment Moderation” that help you identify potential spam.

(1)  Hold a comment in the queue if it contains [ 2 ] or more links. As WordPress explain with this setting, a common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks. Setting the number of links at “2” will hold the comment from publication until you to approve it.

(2) When a comment contains any of these words… There is a large text box with this option where you can add, line-by-line, the words, website addresses, or other information that you think will be spam for your website  An obvious place to start would be to add words like “Viagra” and “make money” to this list. You should continue to add to this list as you see obvious spam words in the comment you receive. The comments containing these ‘red flag’ words wont be deleted, but are held in a moderation queue for you to approve or remove. If you do consider a comment to be spam, them add their website address to the Comment Blacklist (see below).

Comment Blacklist

This is a box that allows you to add website addresses, email addresses, etc. that a spammer has put in their comments. Having their website on your blacklist – which will probably the ONLY real piece of information in the comment –  will prevent the same spammer from attacking your website again.

Here’s a video to demonstrate the Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist tools:

2. Only allow authenticated people to comment

The tactics behind  using WordPress’ built-in comment tools deal with spam comments that have already been submitted to your website, and require you to take some sort of action to clean them up.

Things would be much easier if you could at least know that the people who are leaving comments on your website are real people and not spam robots. One of the simple way to deter all but the most sophisticated spammer is to have your visitors register and/or sign in when leaving a comment.

Registration desk sign
Registration Essential

Register on your website

WordPress allows visitors to become registered users of your website, and you can set it up so that only registered users can post comments:

  1. First go to the ‘General’ dashboard, under ‘Settings’, and check the checkbox “Anyone can register”.
  2. Next, go to the ‘Discussions’ dashboard and check the box ““

From this point on, visitors can register on your website and leave comments only after logging in.

Use Facebook credentials

An alternative to requiring visitors to register on your website is to require them to use their  Facebook credentials. There are a number of free WordPress plugins you can install that will only allow visitors to leave comments after they have logged in to Facebook. Having them do so has the additional benefit of placing a link to your website on the visitor’s Facebook timeline, which will increase the exposure of your website.

WordPress and Facebook registration wont guarantee a spam-free experience, but they will deter the less sophisticated spammer, as well as spam robots, from abusing your posts.

3. Use Anti-spam plugins and services

Wordpress Plugins
WordPress Plugins

The above techniques to stop comment spam in WordPress are fare easy to set up, but they do take some time to administer, and require you to curate the comments to weed out the spam

If you have too much comment traffic to effectively manage blacklists and user registrations, or you simply prefer not to, then it’s time to increase your anti-spam arsenal by installing a WordPress plugins (or two).

A quick search for “spam” on the WordPress plugin repository turns up over 600 results. These free plugins take a large number of approaches to preventing spam – everything from sharing blacklists, to insisting your visitors solve a simple puzzle, to a statistical analysis of the comment text. Find one the suits your tastes and see how you well it works.

If you do have a little money to spend, then by far the best approach is to leave it to the professionals.

There are several online services that will filter all of the comments received on your website for spam, allowing through only those that pass their strict set of tests and trashing the rest.

The most popular anti-spam plugin is the one that is installed by the makers of WordPress themselves when you first install their software.

Akismet, from Automattic, Inc., is easy to set up and, I’ve found, extremely effective at stopping comment spam. Prices range from “free” for small personal blogs, up to US$50 per month for “Enterprise” websites. It’s US$5 per month for small non-personal websites.

Yes, you can be spam-free!

So, there are a number of straight-forward approaches to combating spam comments, and you really should be doing at least something to stop the abuse of your website. Not only will you website look better, and be a social hub of comment and discussion on your posts, but you also deny the success of one a person (or company) from using such a disruptive call for attention. Hopefully, they’ll consider spamming a waste of effort.

Facebook Like icon

Facebook Kills Suspicious Likes

Social Media News,

As an Internet Marketer you must be using the awesome power of social proof to drive traffic to your website. Facebook ‘likes’, Twitter ‘tweets’, Pinterest ‘pins’, and Google ‘plus’ should all be part of your content traffic strategy. More than ever, search engines are placing a high value on the interaction and approval of your business, products and services from within social networking sites to calculate the authority of your website content. And, as we all know, the more authority you have in a particular niche, the higher your search engine ranking will be.

Getting Facebook Likes the wrong way

For the past few years, many Internet Marketers have tried to increase their social standing through more dubious means by generating a huge number of likes, tweets, pins, and plus’ either by paying low cost service providers to do it, or by using automated ‘bot’ software. This activity is reminiscent of the high-volume “back-link building” activity that has driven Internet marketer “Warrior” activity ever since Google published their earlier PageRank algorithm, which based search engine ranking on the number of back-links to a website.

Well, in the same way Google got wise to the manipulation of their search results, and changed their algorithm, Facebook are about to wipe the smiles off the faces of a very large number of Internet marketers. On August 31st, 2012, the Facebook security team announced in a blog post that they were now able to detect suspiciously generated Likes, and will remove them:

When a Page and fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific Page and engaging with that brand’s content. As such, we have recently increased our automated efforts to remove Likes on Pages that may have been gained by means that violate our Facebook Terms.

Facebook doesn’t Like a lot of Likes

Curiously, it doesn’t seem to as much of a problem as you would think, with just 1% of Likes on any given Facebook page considered dubious. However, the Facebook security team revealed that ‘purchased bulk Likes’ (low-cost service providers) and ‘malware’ (bots) aren’t the only way to twist things in your favour. Indeed, two other methods seem very ‘black hat’; compromised accounts and deceived users:

These newly improved automated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes… we only want people connecting to the Pages and brands with whom they have chosen to connect. Beyond the need to maintain authentic relationships on Facebook, these third-party vendors often attempt to use malware or other forms of deception to generate fraudulent Likes, which is harmful to all users and the internet as a whole.

Oh dear. But, this has been going on for years. Why is Facebook taking such action only now? They would likely argue two main reasons: First, that suspicious traffic from Internet Marketers has reached epidemic proportions. One percent of Likes may not sound like a lot but, of course, this is 1% of 2.7 billion Likes and comments per day. Secondly, that it has taken time to develop their cyber-defences against such suspicious activity. I’m sure both of the reasons are entirely valid, but an interest comment in their blogpost points to another more interesting reason. The same reason, in fact, that prompted Google to release the Panda an Penguin updates to their search ranking algorithms.

This improvement will allow Pages to produce ever more relevant and interesting content, and brands will see an increase in the true engagement around their content.

Oh, really? Is Facebook taking on Google at their own game? There are a number of rumours around the ‘net that Facebook intends to displace the search giant as the place to go to find relevant content. And what better way to rank relevant, authoritative content than by the social vote given to it by its fans?

The correct way to get Facebook Likes

Politics and corporate ambition aside, there is a clear lesson here for every Internet Marketer, whether chasing Google back-links or Plus’, Facebook Likes, Pinterest pins, or anything else: You need to build an audience for your business in a way that plays by the rules.

Not only will this correctly generated social authority remain with you for many years, surviving successive rounds of algorithm updates, but your customers are real people who will buy from you repeatedly and recommend your quality products and services. There are a number of ways to generate authentic social authority:

1. Publishing relevant, high quality, engaging content on niche Facebook pages/Twitter streams/Pinterest boards/Google circles. Fill out your profile information properly and interested people will have no trouble finding you.

2. Viral images (cure kittens in wicker baskets, and so on) are very popular on all the social networks. Genuinely so. They are easy to produce, can be linked back to your website and the very best will spread like wildfire around the ‘net. There is no manipulation here, other than “tugging at the heart strings”.

3. “Connect to reveal”. Use the “apps” and other linking technologies developed by the social networks themselves to create a buzz for your products. People interested in obtaining product, or getting access to content, from your own website, can be asked to Like, Tweet, Pin or G+ before they are allowed access. It works extremely well and is completely supported by the social networks.

4. Media buying. Yes, a little money spent in the right places will rocket authentic traffic to your relevant, authoritative content (see #1 above). In fact, Facebook ads return more ‘bang for the buck’ than most other online advertising because of the high degree of audience targeting that can be done. (Only want to target 20-year old males who own ginger tabby cats and play the saxophone? No problem!) Clearly all the social networks support traffic generation (and subsequent social approval) through media buying because this is how they make their money. It is one way of generating Likes on Facebook that is never going to go away.

You can read the Facebook Security Team’s blog post in full at Facebook.com.