What Makes A WordPress Comment Spam

It can sometimes be hard to discern between a true comment, and comment spam. There used to be a time when seeing a whole bunch of ‘great article’ comments was actually a good thing, and you didn’t have the sit there and think whether or not they did it just for the link or not. Times have certainly changed, you kinda have to be a skeptic nowadays because the majority of people are doing things solely for selfish reasons. That is why on some of the big blog sites you’ll only see long _actual_ responses. All those ‘Great article, keep up the good work’ comments have just become fluff, even if the intentions were good.

Not much you can do though aside from wade through your comment submissions everyday and make the judgement for yourself. Could be a good thing though, from the perspective of a site own, comments are useful because they are supposed to be a way to generate additional _useful_ content… so it doesn’t seem too unreasonable to delete those which are not useful or contribute to the discussion.

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Jeff  Replied:
September 14th, 2009 at 4:09 pm

humm… is this really a human comment??

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Bryant Smith  Replied:
September 14th, 2009 at 5:19 pm

Busted

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If the comments posted are in relation to the post, then probably the comment is not a spam and if the comment is quite general, has nothing to with the post then definitely the comment is a spam.

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Jeff, you’ve so hit the nail on the head with this one. I can’t understand how anyone would think that posting a useless misspelled ‘thank you’ post is going to get them traffic on their website. Not to mention that all blog comment links are nofollow anyhow..??

I post-moderate comments on my site, and I have allowed some to remain that are questionable, which I probably shouldn’t have. But generally, if the comment is not benefitting the discussion, I agree that it shouldn’t be approved — even it if it is legitimate. The purpose of comments is to add valuable complementary info to expand a post’s content. Many of the large development and design blogs have so many useless comments, it’s a shame.

Anyhow, you’ve inspired me to go through my older posts and delete anything that even remotely resembles comment spam. )

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Jeff  Replied:
September 15th, 2009 at 7:34 am

Louis, I had dofollow enabled on this site until last week. So that is where some of the spam came from.

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Jesse Dictor  Replied:
October 12th, 2009 at 3:10 am

I continue to miss what is so bad about dofollow spam. Everything it seems to bring is seems good to me.

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And yet here is another example, just regurgitating what is stated in the post.. Why?

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Hi Jeff, you don’t need to post this. I just thought I’d let you know that there is a list of do-follow blogs circulating a lot of the business marketing sites, and your blog is included. That is probably where you are getting most of your spammers from.
niceblogger.com has one list I am aware of.
Maybe if you contact them, then you might stop getting the annoying spammers.

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Jeff  Replied:
September 15th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

Deb, I just changed the dofollow setting so eventually it should stop.

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Well, that’s the drawback of having a popular site. Spams are all over the web, we can’t stop them, but we still have to act in order to minimize them.

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I post-moderate comments on my site, and I have allowed some to remain that are questionable, which I probably shouldn’t have. But generally, if the comment is not benefitting the discussion, I agree that it shouldn’t be approved — even it if it is legitimate

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I manage a dofollow PR 2 blog and roughly two months ago I adopted a new comment policy that keeps the spammers away. Do check it out when you’ve got the time. Folks who ignore my comment policy 99% of the time have their comments deleted irrespective of how long and meaningful their comments are.
Another fix you could try to make the spammers work a lil bit more is enabling dofollow only after one has left say 10 to 15 meaningful comments.
Comments on my blog have drastically reduced since the implementation of this policy BUT at least I can save my pagerank for the few who care enough to read my posts and follow my rules.

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Briefcases  Replied:
November 20th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

The minimum 10-15 posts before dofollow strategy sounds good. That definitely would keep away a lot of spammers. Many just want to leave 1 or 2 comments and then move onto the next site. They don’t want to take the time to leave that many legitimate comments.

As for using keywords in the name field, I don’t think that is necessarily spam. People can leave decent comments, but at the same time build up keyword links. You just have to be respectful of what kind of keywords you do use in your name field. Using many words or linking to a questionable topic is spammy. I like to watch what others do on the blog and follow suit. Most blogs do not have an actual comment policy to refer to.

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P.S: I sometimes use keywords when commenting on your blog. Sorry. Do please look into adding Keywordluv on your site so that even with your new nofollow policy we can still leave links to our blogs using our preferred anchor texts.

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yes some spammers write their comment even without reading the post. i appreciate your act. i also want to get rid of spammers.

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I can’t stand spam, and a lot of the spam examples you’ve posted I have come across several times. In fact, I am skeptical of anything that is under 25 words or so. Anything that sounds vague, that could be a default comment on any blog out there just throws up red flags.

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It can’t be help, we can’t stop them leaving spam comment but the good thing tho we can filter it.

Dofollow blogs are prone to this spams, so its up to us whether to approve the comment or denied.

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It is a fact that people spam blogs with high page rank. It is growing intensely now a days. So it is better to understand what spam comments are exactly and what isn’t a spam.A comment which is in relation to the post is a correct comment and a comment which has nothing to do with the post can be considered as a spam. I am sure that many people will definitely understand what is a spam and what isn’t.

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Nowadays you can spot comment spam from a mile off, I mean you see comment after comment of things like “great post!” or “thanks for this, i will bookmark your blog” blar blar blar. Ironically if the spammers actually posted a relevant comment then they might get a backlink, instead of having 90% of their comments rejected by the admins of the blogs.

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Thanks for sharing!

….just kidding!

You have a point, blogging should be useful for visitors and for the blogger itself. I’ve seen maaaaany blogs with warnings like this one (well this is the first one I saw that added “sample messages”).
For me it was horrible to have a blog for parents and children and receive “Viagra” or “Hot chick wanna have sex” posts….

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Hi Jeff

As per Debs comment I would think you are getting a ton of traffic and comments from the dofollow lists that I’ve seen this blog on. The problem will be its unlikely to actually stem the spam because these lists typically sit around for years unchanged until virtually all the sites will have switched to nofollow because they are sick of the influx of spam. Its a shame that visitors from those lists don’t bother to check if all they are after is a link. We get a ton of spam through our blog which hasn’t ever been dofollow so I hate to think what your moderation queue looks like each day lol.

Joe

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I have actually seen lots of sites full of spam. Most especially those sites that haven’t had any updates for a very long time. Most bloggers take this issue very seriously, some already changed their rules to settle this problem. As a rule of thumb, I actually spend time to read all the post before making a comment. I’m also lucky to find posts that contain lots of information that can really help me.

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when your blog is a do-follow.. many bloggers lists your blog for people to make links.. this ultimately results in spamming..
my blog is too a do-follow and i get too much spams.. it is a very major prob these dayz

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Have you tried the cookies for comment plugin – I think that is what it is called. Prevents bots from posting to your website … and yes, I have comment spam too. Matt Cutts did a vid presentation in San Fran last month on this at WordCamp

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I also want make my blog do-follow…
but if you tell if blogs have do-follow is risk for spam, I worry about it.

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Repossessed Cars  Replied:
October 21st, 2009 at 6:09 pm

Well, anyone who knows what they’re doing will view the page source and determine that way if the blog is dofollow or not, whether you advertise the fact or not. I do agree that advertising the fact is going to bring in spammers…but..it may also bring in some valuable visitors, especially if you want visitors, say, from the IM niche who are going to be interested in what you’re saying. If I’m being totally honest, I admit that I googled for dofollow blogs and found this site on one of the lists that somebody mentioned earlier. However, I’d also like to say, that I like this blog, will look around it some more, and will probably come back, especially as my sites have, up-till-now, been wordpress sites of one form or another.

p.s. nice blog. keep the gud wurk going on! yes!

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LOL, you forgot the ones that talk about random medications. I like all the misspellings – your tips is wunderful. lol

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The list goes on and on. Spam is like a snake with infinite heads: you can keep cutting but it will regrow. The best way to fight spammer is to find a way to make them invest some time before leaving a comment. A post like this one took me about 5 minutes to read and go through some of the comments. But setting up a minimum amount of time before a visitor can comment, that can be a deterrent.

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It is a fact that people spam blogs with high page rank. It is growing intensely now a days. So it is better to understand what spam comments are exactly and what isn’t a spam.thanks a lot.

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That’s an understandable policy on comments. I would probably decide for a similar if I had a blog. I know that people with do follow blogs have to do a lot of work on regulating comments, so putting at least a little bit of effort into the comment is at least I can do.

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Hey why isn’t my blog working right? Can you fix it? Just kidding!

I do agree with you that not only are there more and more spammers and drive-by commenters every day but I also can’t understand why they would even think that leaving a drive-by comment is a good idea. By now they’ve got to be familiar with how bloggers treat such comments and they’re just making extra work for themselves and for the blog owners. I think using KeywordLuv in combination with your comment policy is a good idea. Some people are discouraged from leaving a thoughtful comment if they “don’t get anything in return” and KeywordLuv solves that problem so it’s a win-win. Btw, I hope you don’t mind that I put keywords in the Name field – your policy didn’t say not to do that so I hope it’s okay. If it’s not, I won’t do it again.

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Nice post….lol
It is normal that a blogger face with Spammers nowadays. There should be more security measures against them, because there are certain programs designed to spam blogs. The latest version of wp is known for his high security features.

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Great post!

Just kidding, I think akismet is a good way of fighting spam. In general, spam is pretty easy to spot, it is nice that we are finally getting (free) bots that can spot it for us.

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I can’t stand spam, and a lot of the spam examples you’ve posted I have come across several times. In fact, I am skeptical of anything that is under 25 words or so. Anything that sounds vague, that could be a default comment on any blog out there just throws up red flags.

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i think do follow is great to add to your blog.it helps to get traffic and askimet is wonderful plug in available to stop spammers.

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It is very true that spamming is going on around and people are finding ways to stop it. Spamming can never be stopped but can be reduced. Akismet has helped a lot of blogger to end this act and i am sure this would really be appreciated by many people.

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when your blog is a do-follow.. many bloggers lists your blog for people to make links.. this ultimately results in spamming..
my blog is too a do-follow and i get too much spams.. it is a very major prob these

what about pingback from autoblog website it’s also SPAM?

thanks

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Jeff  Replied:
September 28th, 2009 at 7:25 am

OMG a pingback from an autoblog spam? Not only spam but content theft. I hate autoblog or spam blogs.

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Sometimes I’m happy that my blog gets so little traffic. I actually enjoy moderating my comments. Some of the blog spam is so irrelevant that it becomes hilarious.

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I think that installing Dofollow,CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugins are the ultimate way to share some link love to your visitors,unfortunately these plugins are a spam invitation for many and i don’t talk about bots,I’m talking about real humans that don’t even take the time to read the post and leave garbage comments like “nice article” “great post”.

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Automated spam is obviously unbearable. BUT…I don’t think you should dread the commenters who come from the linklists so much.
1.You often get free links on those posts.
2. You get alot of new visitors and even comments like this one, which would otherwise never have appeared!

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A common approach I have come across is, users who even do not read the post itself and are not aware of its content, while they only read couple of the left comments and leave a slighly moderated one, following the manners others have commented.

There are many lists online with highly ranking blogs which provide dofollow links. There are also a bunch of good tools which track dofollow wordpress blogs, obtaining their rank and basing the search around particular keywords and keyword phrases, even supporting translations into numerous languages.

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This is a very interesting discussion (i’ve actually read it ;D ).

I dislike the no-follow solution and moderating spam comments seems to be the best way. There are both pros and cons of course, but if you can’t give the persons who comment anything back, there will be no interesting discussions. On the other hand, a backside of moderation is that the time it takes to get a post approved makes the discussions grow slow (if the admin has other stuff to do than moderate comments all days).

Will we ever find a good solution or is these problems just getting worse?

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IT’s nice thinking I dislike the no-follow solution and moderating spam comments seems to be the best way. There are both pros and cons of course, but if you can’t give the persons who comment anything back, there will be no interesting discussions.

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Its a constant problem that never has a true answer. It forced me to take down comments on on of my sites but that was a last resort. I found that on that one spammers were able to get around the captcha. It seems to be a losing battle and you can only try to control spam rather than eliminate it.

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Spammers are really annoying. Anti-spam is upgrading time in time but spammers also keep upgrading to make more spams.

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Really spamers are annoying me with there spams , for me the best way to fight them is to use captcha code in the comment box especially if your blog is Dofollow , other prefer arkimst , but for me captcha is the best solution for spam , before install captcha I get about three hundred spam every week , but now I’m getting only human comments .. thanks

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I think it’s really hard to seperate those who want to have a backlink for free from the others who just want to share their opinion, tip, trick or improvement.

Sometimes I see comments that make me smile because they are disguised almost perfectly. But when I think about comments like “Hey, I just dropped by and think your blog is awesome. I added you to my RSS… blabla” again I realize the magic: It’s spam!

Most of my spam comments are about Cialis and Online Poker and these are covered by Akismet. The comments you mention in your post have to be sorted out manually and I hate it. On the other hand I love it because some people are very desperate…

So, would you consider my comment as spam? If not: Why not? You will never know whether I tried to please you by sharing my opinion and experience. In the end I put my URI in the form and that makes it so difficult. Although I am really discussing your article you do not have a clue about my motif. If you were heading for my blog and talking as much as I do right now I would never think about you being a spammer. Enough now.

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I’m less than 4 months into blogging and wordpress. The whole SEO thing is very interesting to me. It seems the bots can be stopped pretty easily, but many sites just sell or post list of links to blogs where you can create a backlink. These people aren’t really interested in your blog per say so is that spam? I guess yes if there comments don’t relate to the article and no if they do.

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Thanks for the post. I was actually just googling “what’s considered comment spam” and came across this post. I’m always stuck between deleting or approving comments that are right on the edge.

Spam is definitely getting smarter…

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I was having problems with spam for awhile even with askimet until I found out that it was manual spam. Once I found out that I put a simple captcha and it has knocked out 75%. Our website knocked out all of the spam once we decided there was no need for the reviewer to place their website. Blog spammers keep getting smarter as now I have seen them comment spamming on content that is related to whatever message they post.

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I own an article directory powered by WordPress and I receive hundreds of spam everyday.

Luckily for me, I use Spam Karma 2 to block most of them. But like what Justin said, he’s right. Spam IS getting alot smarter and more of them are getting through my filters.

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This is something I wrestle with continuously too. Some niches seem more prone to it that others, and it depends a lot on the configuration of your blog. I have used CommentLuv on a dofollow general blog for over a year and there has been no upsurge in comment spam. However, on another PR2 webmaster related blog I have, making it dofollow resulted in a huge upsurge in spam.

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I have taken steps on this site to reduce comment spam and if you actually read the fine print just above the comment area on single posts here, you will read what I consider a legitimate comment.

Great post. Thanks for this. This could help me identify which comment should not be deleted.

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I share your opinion.
I personally let people add their backlinks to their sites when they bring theme relevant content in my blog. It´s not demanded too much if they really read my article and reply something senseful. All others will be deleted…

Daniel

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my blog is dofollow but i have comment moderation on so i can stop the spam. It is the best way to provide people with backlinks plus keep your blog safe, in my opinion.

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Yeah, it seems spammers are getting more sneakier. Here’s one I get often:

“Great and interesting post! I will subscribe to your feed.”

Many of them still make it through the spam filter unfortunately.

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When the comment has nothing to do with the topic! I think that’s a pretty reliable way to gauge a spam comment.

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And when a comment is spam, like yours the link is removed.

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Since installing the dofollow Plugin I have seen a bit of an increase in backlinks so very pleased about that. Couple of spam comments to deal with but I guess that was to be expected.

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Hi, spamming is truly a problem for the bloggers. I really don’t know why do this people spam, while they can comment formally and properly, maybe they just want to waste time in making their senseless comments.. called as a SPAM.. well, dofollow comments are such good and great to ease the problem of the bloggers.. thanks for your informative article…

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Hay… Spam.. I guess everyone of us became a victim of spam comments or message…. I am also using wordpress and its actually hard to prevent spam comments.. When I looked up at my unapproved comments, almost all of them were talking irrelevant topics which is not related to my posts.

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There is so much spam on blogs now and it spoils it so much for blogger, on some blogs you do not even want to read the comments. If people have nothing good to say then do us all a favor and do not bother.

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I have to agree. The misspellings and poorly structured sentences only leads one to believe that either the comments are automated or at the very least the human commenter needs a remedial course in writing.
Nothing says SPAM better than the above.

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I run a relatively new blog about electronic cigarettes and am just starting to feel the effects of comment spam. Constantly, people post about crap that has nothing to do with my topic like “tooth whitening” or people just saying “hey man nice post” shamelessly trying to score a backlink. I use WordPress and am having trouble setting up Askimet – I’ve been reading that it works well to fight off spam. Does anybody have an exact link where I can get an API key? I’m so sick of comment spam! Sorry for such a long rant, I just had to get that off my chest.

Oh by the way, “Great Post”

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Jeff  Replied:
October 11th, 2009 at 4:16 pm

Getting an API key is as simple as reading the instructions the prompt directs you to in the WP dashboard.

http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress-guide/api-key-confusion

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Electric Cigarette  Replied:
October 12th, 2009 at 2:22 am

Jeff,

Thanks for the quick reply. The API Key confusion article was very helpful. Exactly what I was looking for.

Cheers,
Jack

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One thing I’ve come to realise is that as long as one has blog or site that allows the public to leave comments, it is always open to abuse.

I once had a spammer post 12 comments on my blog within minutes – luckily for me, I had a system in place that auto blacklists IPs if successive repeated request are made within a short period of time.

You should explore that route.

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Sorry, I just had another thought after reading through the final comments. You know, people on SEO / IM forums are actually selling these dofollow blog lists. Would there be any legs in tracking down the authors and asking for a per unit sold payment as you are being used in this way?

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Jeff  Replied:
October 21st, 2009 at 8:40 pm

I wouldn’t want to waste the time trying to track them them down. I don’t mind that much, it seems this last post has attracted more comments than any other. I turned dofollow off weeks ago anyway so they are selling a lie.

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for the broad enternet informaiton, there are spams innevitabllly.however,for some people who are really the first time to enter or first time leave their person opinion,is it right to consider what they said are all spam?

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LOL, yes i agree. Tons of spam comments on my blog looks like that too.

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I used to have a blog but got spammed way too much by them comments with loads or URL’s super spam and I just had enough. Also “great article” ha ha love that one and the post just being a video with no text, obv they have look at it.

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LOL, yes i agree. Tons of spam comments on my blog looks like that too

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Its a difficult topic really, on one hand there needs to be an openness which allows anyone to air their views on a topic. On the other you don’t want to see threads full of random short comments!

There are a few methods to avoid comment spam, but careful moderation and use of nofollow tags is key

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Interesting article. Well comment spam can really be annoying. It wouldn’t matter if they contribute to the topic but posting up links and absurd content is just plain annoying.

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Lets face it, most of the people here have just gone through the motions of leaving a relevant comment, not through any genuine interest but just for the baclink. Is this not spam?

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Jeff  Replied:
November 16th, 2009 at 7:36 am

Not if its relevant.

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Jeff its true that these kind of comments are just spam nothing else. These kind of comments never get any benefit.

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Forms are even worse. The spam is publicly posted and then the mess must be cleaned up. I need to install Akismet on that too, just for an added layer of protection. But with humans making up the bulk of the spam, there is no other choice but to use the whack a mole approach.

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when your blog is a do-follow.. many bloggers lists your blog for people to make links.. this ultimately results in spamming..
my blog is too a do-follow and i get too much spams.. it is a very major prob these days
but that depend on your topics
and the poster

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Well as long as there is relevance to the content, a comment is well appreciated. But for some who posts five comments with same nonsense words, then you know what to do with it.

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I just had to comment on this one. I’ve often wondered how much of the comment – osphere in blogs is really motivated by people wanting backlinks to their sites. In training people on how to post on blogs to generate backlinks, I’ve always overemphasized that the main goal is add value to the discussion. If you can’t do that, then you need to move on. If you can do that, then it’s up to the site owner to judge whether or not to allow your comment to go through. There is no karmic exception for blog commenting – do unto other blogs as you would have other blogs do unto you….
And personally, I go back and forth on the whole keywords in the name field. Sometimes it seems spammy to me, sometimes I go with it, as I did here.

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I recently made the move over from Blogger to WordPress, and have instantly noticed a massive increase in spam comments. 6 months on Blogger – 1 spam comment. One month on WordPress – over 60 spam comments already. For the life of me I have no idea why – traffic is the same so far, so it’s not like the site suddenly got insanely popular. Too bad though – I far prefer WordPress, so I guess I’ll just have to deal with it.

Would love to hear if anyone here has any idea of why this is? Reckon it’s purely down to not having Captcha on my WP comments? Can’t remember whether Blogger had it enabled by default…

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Jeff  Replied:
December 16th, 2009 at 8:58 am

Because WordPress is more popular than Blogger, and there are more high page rank WordPress blogs. So there are programs and scripts that target WordPress blogs for the spammers.

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Well comment spam can really be annoying. It wouldn’t matter if they contribute to the topic but posting up links and absurd content is just plain annoying.

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And yet here is another example, just regurgitating what is stated in the post.. Why?

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Akismet takes care all my spam, i love this plugin.

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As I may have posted before, my blog(s) get ridiculous amounts of foreign spam. Incoherent posts with just a bunch of words that make no sense.

Including, of course the usual “nice job” and What a great post. You are the best!”

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I’ve just enabled DoFollow on my blog. I’ve the time right now to sift through the junk in search of a few good posts. I find it sad that there are more spam posts than legitimate ones.

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Akismet is the best anti spam !

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Hide URI line also helps. It won’t drive spammers to your website.

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