Have a Curb on Comment Spam to Keep the Search Engine Ranking of Your WordPress Blog Site Intact
The internet teems with comment spam just as a warehouse stuffed with goods crawls with rats. The most widespread across the World Wide Web affecting is blog comment spam affecting WordPress based sites and their search engine rankings. It has been the bane of WordPress bloggers. WordPress is fast-growing blog publishing software. To prevent link juice from passing to the spammy inbound links, Google had introduced the ‘rel=no follow’ option for hyperlink in 2005. Sadly and surprisingly enough, blog comment spam is still in action. The failure of your efforts to get rid of comment spam is not the end of the world. Take heart and go through my blog on how to protect your WordPress blog against comment spam using the available resources.
Detrimental Effects of Spam Comments on the SEO of Your Site
The intensity of a detrimental effect determines the necessity of an action. Know the possible harmful effects of blog comment spam, if it remains uncontrolled. It stains your blog posts airing quality and valuable content, and thereby decreasing the popularity of your blog site. Low quality comments by spammers filling in your blog site’s comment field will get normal visitors distracted. The visitors will shorten the duration of their stay on your site and label the site as spammy. Apprehending the links that spammy comments contain to be malware, they will say no to visit your site in future.
Blog comment spammers use automated bots to create automatic comments. If you turn blind to this issue, the spammers will affect much of your MySQL database. Worse will be the consequence when you will find the site down to your utter amazement. You will experience the worst of it, when it will take a toll on the search engine ranking and visibility of your site. Your site’s tryst with the search engines will come upon a rock, if the search engine bots find the site infested with oodles of spammy comments.
Comment Moderation – an Anti-spam Application of WordPress
Comment moderation is a useful application for the use of WordPress bloggers to keep blog comment spam in check. Enabling it will curb the immediate display of spam comments on your website. Comment moderation is available with the latest version of WordPress that is 2.9.2. By means of this WordPress resource, you can restrain the spamming activity of spammers and hold their spam comments for moderation. It will seek your approval for the display of any comment on the site. The following are the steps to enable the application –
• Log in to the admin panel of your WordPress blog site
• Make your way to ‘settings’ under Dashboard
• Make a click on ‘Discussion’
• Use ‘check only’ option on a few specific items
WP-Spamfree Plug-in to Restrict the Spamming Activity of Spammers
Rolling with the punches, spam bots have become smarter to defy the restrictions of comment moderation applications. Deleting a bulky volume of spam comments on a regular basis is really annoying. If Akismet does not work because of hosting restrictions, you had better take turn to using WP-Spamfree plugin. It works in a limited hosting environment where Akismet fails to operate. The procedure to install the plugin is as follows –
• Log on to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-spamfree/
• Download and save the folder on your desktop, and unzip it
• Upload it to the WP-plugins directory in the WordPress server
• Log in to the admin panel of your WordPress blog site
• Move to the plugins section and activate the downloaded plug-in
The upside of using this plug-in is that you are not required to input a captcha and it traps almost 99.99% of the total spam comments. You can trace the WP-spamfree statistics in the WordPress dashboard. Let the plug-in be configured by default. It will let you implement the rel=nofollow tag in your blog’s comment field. Discourage the spammers by letting them use no keywords or site URLs in their comments. Maintain a comment policy in the comment field and let them agree to it. This way, your WordPress blog site is safe from spammers.
December 13th, 2010 at 12:42 am
You made many helpful points there. We did a look for in the topic and also observed a lot of folks can consent together with your site.
January 9th, 2011 at 10:34 pm
I thought it was going to be some boring old site, but I’m glad I visited. I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.
May 22nd, 2011 at 6:16 pm
I want to show my passion for your generosity supporting women who have the need for assistance with your subject matter. Your special dedication to passing the solution all around appears to be rather effective and has regularly made employees like me to achieve their endeavors. The interesting guidelines means so much a person like me and still more to my office colleagues. Thanks a lot; from all of us.