Protecting your Wordpress Blog from Spam

By: mixblog | November11

Blogging is becoming more and more popular every year on the internet. It seems that with the popularity in blogs increasing that Wordpress is getting used more and more. One of the biggest downfalls with blogging is spam. Spammers just love blogs and use them frequently to spam their products or services. Search engine optimization professionals and webmasters will also spam blogs to increase their backlink amounts to rank higher in search results.

Well, the buck stops here with this article because we are going to make your blog spam proof. This article will go over several different methods and theories to prevent spam and deter spammers from returning to your blog.

Just Say No-Follow

By default Wordpress uses the no-follow attribute for blog comment links. This is perfect and you should never remove it or use a plugin that removes this attribute. It was created by search engines so they know if a specific URL on a web page should not be given any value by that web page; this goes for anchor text and Pagerank. So, by effectively having the no-follow attribute in your blog comment hyperlink syntax you are taking away all the SEO value of the link. Sadly this won’t deter some people and they’ll still spam your blog with hyperlinks in your comments.

Use CAPTCHA to Slap Robots

Many times spammers will use automated programs and scripts to leave blog comments. This can be very annoying since the same spammer will repeatedly visit your site over and over and waste your time. A solution is to use what’s called a CAPTCHA solution; this requires a person to enter in words or numbers displayed in an image into a text box to prove they are human. There are quite a few Wordpress plugins that do this and below is a list of a few of them.

· Math Problem Spam Protection
· WP-Spam Free
· Yawasp ‘Yet Another Wordpress Anti-Spam Plugin’

Require User Registration

As dumb as this may seem, require people to register an account on your blog to post comments; most spammers won’t waste the time to create an account. This is also useful to build an e-mail marketing list of people who visit and comment on your blog regularly. Make sure to only allow new registered users to post comments and not create actual posts. What would be worse than a spammer commenting on your blog… a spammer creating new posts!

Summary

Most likely you’ll still get people trying to spam comments and it’s just a fact of life when it comes to blogging. The above methods will help reduce the amount of spam you receive and should allow you to spend more time writing useful content and approving real useful comments.