Novice Bloggers

Take Care Ann, Your Blog can be Spammed

Posted on 09. Dec, 2009 by Senthil Ramesh in Uncategorized

Take Care, Ann Smarty – Your Blog is spammed.

Welcome to WordPress Wednesdays.

We were speaking about some small error in Mashable’s blog last Thursday. We also had a response for it from Mashable CTO, Mr. Fernandes. And today’s post too is something similar to it, that speaks about a small mistake in a very popular blog, DailySEOTip.

When I was reading an article in Daily SEO Tip, a blog run by SEO expert Ann Smarty, I was stunned to see a comment that is not at all related to the article discussed there. The comment spoke something related to Microsoft Office but the article there was “Difference between ALLINTITLE and INTITLE”. May be this article was older one, but the comment was very new (posted on 07-Dec-09). Here is the snap of what the comment was.

Spam at daily seo tip blog

Well, what might be the case here. She is so good at SEO but dint take so much care in fighting the spammers? Or she is not aware about that? Or having much works so that she cant look at her comments?

Whatever it is she might take a look and I wish to say some of the things we bloggers can take care in order to fight against spam and this deals mainly with wordpress blogs ( as most of the blogs are WP powered and there are similar things for Blogger too )

Have a plugin to fight against Spam.

Akismet is the one that comes with WordPress default. But there are lot of plugins available that can fight spam such as WP Spam Free, YAWASP etc.., But the fact is use any one of them not more than one. Akismet itself is a powerful SPAM fighting plugin and it can filter most of the SPAMs.

Use Comment Moderation:

In wordpress, admin panel at Settings >> Discussion you can see all the options for comments for your blog. Change the moderation settings there. Its always good to moderate the first comment and allowing the next comments without moderation. You can determine from the first comment itself whether he is a human or a SPAM.

Use moderation for comments with links:

As we can see with above pic, there are three links in the text comment area. Most spammers always try to have number of links at the comments ( basically they are not satisfied with link we provide with their name ). So enabling the option of moderate comments with links and making the number can help you to moderate those comments with links, thereby avoiding SPAM.

Use Simple Captchas:

Though we make above said, its always good to havea captcha at your site to fight the spammers. But, what is annoying fact is, sometimes people find it harder to comment at those blogs who use captchas. I suggest using “Really Simple Captcha” plugin which is easy one or the famous “Recaptcha” plugin which is used at most of the places.

Be careful with DoFollow

Needless to say, DailySEOTip is a DoFollow blog. Though there is lot of benefits for us as well as the commentators by giving a dofollow link at the comments, we are also facing a risk of being spammed. So, if you are making your blog do follow, then do concentrate more on fighting spam and make sure to follow the above things.

Whats with you:

I am sure these are not the only things to fight spam. I have given here which are user friendly. So, if something I missed here ( I must’ve) I would love to hear those from you at the comments.

Related posts:

1. Proven Ways to Encourage Comments in your blog Part II
2. Proven ways to Encourage Comments in Your Blog Part I
3. How to increase traffic by Blog Commenting
4. 5 Dont’s in Blog Commenting
5. Create a Buzz and get more exposure

Tags: ann smarty, daily seo tip, spam