Every blogger’s nightmare is having his / her website filled with comment spam, it seems these bots have no plan on stopping. It seems every CMS out there is being target by spam comments, mostly leaving a link to their blog. Hoping to gain a little PR juice and backlink to their website.
Unfortunately, there is no clear way to stop these madness. Even if you hide your comments or disable them, somehow they will get you which will take a lot of space on your database or hosting storage thus increasing your overhead and making your website slow.
Today, we will check out what makes a wordpress comment spam, how to identify if it was a spam and how to stop it or at least making it less.
Identifying a WordPress Comments Spam
Every time you publish a post, comments will come in, but how can we tell if it was a spam or not? Follow this steps;
- Check the name used in the comments, if it contains keywords such as, pharma, loans, or words not related to a name. It’s a spam!
- If you can’t understand the words written on the comment, it’s clearly a spam.
- If the message contains links to non-relevant sites.
- If the email contains a lot of numbers.
- Instead of message, it’s a link with your post on it but turns out it redirects to other website and not relevant to your topic.
Here’s some sample pictures to show you:
Comment with just a link and nothing relevant about the topic.
Trackback created by a software
Non-english comment with different characters in the name field
How to Stop Them
Now that we know what they look like, it’s time to get rid of them. First we will do the basic spam protection method, next we will harden our security.
Activate Akismet from plugin section of your WordPress, and follow the instruction to connect it to Akismet server.
Next, install GASP plugin. On plugin > add new > search Grow Anti Spambot Plugin and activate it. There aren’t that many options from this plugin as it works right away. The cool thing about GASP, is that it adds a checkbox under the comment form so users can click on it to determine they are human, not bots.
Next is to install Anti-spam by Cleantalk, this is a very clever plugin that don’t use captcha or checkbox. What it does is compare the first comment and determine it’s relevancy.
Another one to install is Anti-Spam, it adds javascript user-agents on each comments and determines the bots from humans. Pretty clever!
Next one is we will add a block of code on .htaccess, browse through your cpanel file manager and paste this code into your .htaccess. Hit save after. Thanks to WPRecipes.com! Remember to create a back up before you touch it.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomainname.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]
Now that we’re done protecting our WordPress Website, it’s time to create some awesome content and let the world know about it! Keep watching those WordPress Comment Spam, and make sure you keep your human comments engaged by answering their questions. Because some spam bots will keep on trying to get in.
Be sure to check out your Comment section in your dashboard to see if there’s real people got their comment in the spam que. I hope that by doing this, your website is protected against spam bots and such. If you have other questions, let me know in the comments!
