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How to Fight Spam Comments on WordPress

by Innov8tiv.com

Many website owners face a problem related to spam comments, especially if this is a blog, a popular review platform, or a forum. Spammers usually publish such comments for these three reasons:

1. Advertising – the bot publishes ads with a reference to the website where you can purchase or order something;

2. Link promotion – a real person can also publish a link to the relevant resource;

3. Malware – such posts are similar to usual ads, but the reference leads to a phishing website that sells goods at a big discount – but after the payment is transferred, the scammers disappear.

Why are such replies published on your website? The obvious reason is that the site is not properly configured to protect from spam. If replies are published without moderation, then you need to install a certain protection mechanism like any of the WordPress anti-spam plugins allowing you to detect and remove such comments.

Why Are Spam Replies Unsafe?

There are three important points for this:

Such comments redirect users to other resources, so you are losing traffic;

Links that are not related to your site’s topic can negatively affect the ranking and its place in the search results;

Users negatively perceive spam comments, so they affect losing messages from real users.

As you can see, if you want your site to work correctly and bring the expected value, you have to take all the necessary steps to counter spam. Here are some ideas that you can use.

What to Do With Spam Comments?

There are several solutions to stop spamming on your WordPress site. Please, pay attention to the following steps:

1. Manual Moderation

This option is convenient and reliable, but only for small sites where not many new comments appear. Large resources need to either hire a squad of moderators or install proper protection that will remove a large number of spam comments.

2. CAPTCHA

The simplest and most effective solution that is now used by every big resource.

3. Antispam Plugin

You can use already created antispam plugins that can deal with all common problems related to spam.

4. Individual Moderation

You can make your own blacklist of IP addresses from which spam frequently appears. Add stop words for usernames, site addresses, and message text. You can allow comments without these words to be immediately published, while those that contain them should be sent for moderation or immediately to the ban.

In Conclusion

Spam is an unpleasant problem, but it can be solved. Spend time installing, studying, and configuring plugins, modify the protection according to the latest requirements and no single spam comment will appear on the pages of your site. Good luck!

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