re spam comments on wordpress blog

Hi Janet

It's your blog so you make the decision as to what comments to keep. I'd suggest you follow back and check out the sites they are coming from. If not remotely connected to the same subject as yours, then personally I'd delete them

BTW those comments are typical spammer comments and I always delete, (Askimet is pretty good at picking them out)

Kim

Nice blog BTW

To me spam is anything that gives you no value but takes value from you.

Be aware that many of the comments you see 'thanking you for information' are actually spam. I use my common sense on this. I check to see if the comment has some information that relates directly to my post. If it does, I keep it. I also look at url in the comment. It's often possible to tell from the url if the comment is just backlink spam.

haha yeh if people are using auto commenters they are going to be saying things like:

Wow, great post I found it very helpful.

Great post but I couldnt read it on chrome/operah/my mobile

I found your site on google


blah.. If they dont talka bout the post its self, chances are its spam.

If you want, you can always delete off their website and approve the comment (if you want to create more activities on your site). but make sure the comments are relevant. Anyway it is up to you as it is your blog. You have full control.

Goodness - what prompt and excellent responses to my question. Thank you all of you. I can see I need to use this forum more often if I am ever to get my IM business off the ground

Thanks again

I guess you figured out what spam is. Hope you dont get lot of those as once in a while Akismet is also grabbing few of legitimate comments as well.

Andrea

Happens to me all the time. I just “doctor.” the comments (remove or change the url) and make them relevant to the post. I charge for advertising as a monetization method, so can’t allow people to spam my blogs. Someone posting a relevant comment, or doing an article for me and posting a link in the article/post is one thing, but someone posting irrelevant comments just to plug their site is something entirely different.

I have to admit I am a bit of a softie when it comes to sorting spam from genuine comments - I always check the site link and make sure that the content on that site is what it says it is going to be (you have no idea how much porn I find disguised as other type of links) and the content has to be related to my site in some way. If that is the case I will approve the comment.

BUT what I found when I did that was then the same auto commentators or spammers would come along and blast every post I have with the same link and same comment, so I have put up captcha forms to stop most of the automated stuff and just blanket spam the rest. I am as into link building as the rest of us, but I don't have to spam to do it. I just figure there must be a "suckers" list somewhere and a lot of my blogs must be on it, because I can easily get 100 comments over a couple of days for sites I am not promoting in any way at all. shame they weren't buyers, lol.

best wishes
Lisa

There's no need to be TOTALLy ruthless on blog comments. After all, a blog without comments doesn't look very 'popular', now, does it? Regular comments will keep the search engine spiders coming back regularly, and can add valuable relevant content to your post. Sure, delete the obvious spam, but feel free to 'doctor' and keep the less-than-obvious stuff.

It's fairly easy to tell what is a legitimate comment and what is a comment for a backlink. I delete all comments that aren't relevant to my topic and "sound" real. Most of the garbage that comes in is easy to see that it is pure garbage. From my marketing blogs I get so few real comments that I don't even know why I allow comments at all.

I use WP Spamfree for my blogs and it catches a lot of them

That's not a bad definition - applies to email spam too!

Here are examples from a blog of mine that gets a lot of spam and almost zero legit comments...

Of course, I also get spam that's just a list of links but some spam comments, like those above, are clever to some degree and try to make themselves look like more legit. Generally, anything that's not strongly on topic is going to be spam.

If a comment ends up in the Akismet spam folder it's likely that it will be spam, meaning that the various things that Akismet uses to flag spam has marked it as spam. This appears to be tied to IP address, email, domain, number of links, certain phrases and a history of prior reporting that indicate spam. This isn't 100% foolproof though. If your blog gets a lot of referral/social traffic and comments you probably want to check Akismet for false positives. However, if this is a niche marketing blog that depends mostly on search engine traffic you probably don't need to ever check it.

Using a good anti-spam plugin along with Akismet can really slow the flow of automated spam. The trick is finding one that doesn't break your theme. Another method you can use, if you don't want to give any backlinks, is to modify your theme so that it doesn't accept any URLs or links in a comment. I've been using this on several of my niche blogs and it works good.

I get about 50-150 spam comments a day... most of them have even similar text.

It's really hard to see a REAL comment from all those spam comments.

So basically i delete them all...

Very informative post, however, your header is messed up in Opera.

lol.

I get tons of crap like that on my blog... Is there a plugin that helps automatically stop that???

Funny, as soon as I switched my blog to Wordpress, I started getting those same comments!

I actually downloaded Opera to verify that my site looked OK in that browser. I wonder what the point is of using that particular spam comment.

I was getting ten to fifteen "Please Moderate" emails in my inbox per day. Then I went into my settings and made it so users must subscribe to my blog to post comments. That pretty much got rid of all the spam.

If yoiu dont want spammy comments look into using capcha for wp
its realy good and detering

Lots of good comments here, I had a similar situation a while back so I added a captcha form to be filled out as well as using akismet, but even then some of the more sophisticated spams bots manage to get through.

Still have to do a bit of manual checking.

Spam is fairly obvious, for example if someone post something to the effect of

“excellent post.”

“thank you for posting this its very informative.”

“your post really made my day keep up the fantastic work.”

on your “contact me.” page where you merely have your e-mail address and phone number listed its spam. Likewise, if someone posts these comments or anything similar on a post where you are trying to sell a product and its obvious what your intentions are, then again its obviously spam.

I guess you have to use common sense to determine the answer to your own question. I would anyway. If they appeared to be legimitate and seemed to be contributing to the topic I'd be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. That is just me though. I prefer to trust peoples' motives unless they were clearly spamming.