Keeping Spam Away from Your Wordpress Blog

Hi Everyone,

I am sorry I have not been around for a while but I trust everyone is well and you find this article useful.

Spam is a continual threat for online marketers, bloggers, and website owners. From harmless but annoying keyword spam to potentially hazardous online scams and malicious downloads, spam covers the entire spectrum of annoyances, threats, and off-putting online content. Wordpress users are at risk just as their non-CMS counterparts -- subject to frequent link spamming, marketing messages, and reader annoyances.

Fortunately, Wordpress includes a range of nifty tools for eliminating spam. If you want to see your blog, online community, or commercial website remain spam-free, these four technology-driven, community moderation, and user-based anti-spam tools will no doubt come in useful.

1) Akismet:

Akismet is the Wordpress equivalent of an email spam filter. Much like Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail intercept spam automatically and syphon it into separate storage areas, "spam" categories, and email dividers, Akismet intercepts spam-style comments and ensures that they don't become public.

By checking for common spam messages, affiliate and partner link codes, and well-known spam URLs in messages, Akismet effectively eliminates most blog spam and sales-driven comments. While it's not infallible, Akismet (which is included by default in almost all modern releases of Wordpress) is one of the most low-maintenance and effective anti-spam tools out there for bloggers.

Still, sometimes it's necessary to take a human-driven anti-spam presence, which is why Wordpress and Plugin developers have made three more anti-spam tools available to bloggers and webmasters.

2) Community Moderation:

The most effective anti-spam measure for Wordpress users, community comment moderation ensures that spam comments -- or at least local spam comments -- are kept to an absolute minimum. Much like forum software includes moderator, administrator, and assistant levels, the community moderation features built into Wordpress allow every approved blog reader to up-vote, down-vote, or mark comments as obvious spam.

While ineffective for small blogs and static pages, community moderation has proved very effective on large blogs and community-driven websites. If your blog receives hundreds of thousands of visits every month, community moderation could be a worthwhile addition to your anti-spam inventory. However, if you deal with controversial topics it might be best avoided -- community moderation can result in some interesting 'censorship' and message suppression effects.

3) Comment Controls:

If you prefer a top-down approach to spam and marketing management, comment controls and moderated comments could be the best option for your blog. Wordpress includes options to allow comment approval and denial by default, giving bloggers the ability to moderate and control their comments before the message hits their homepage, blog comments section, or "recent comments" sidebar.

While great for controlling conversation and moving discussion in a particular direction, moderated comments can be a nightmare for part-time bloggers and those that want their blog to be a low-maintenance activity. If you're not interested in spending time on comment moderation and active discussion, comment controls might be best left switched to "off."

Comment moderation can also be frustrating for high-speed blogs and daily updates. Sometimes comments can take mere seconds to roll in, leaving many bloggers stuck updating conversation manually, even in the early states. Again, while far from ideal for low-maintenance bloggers, comment controls can be useful.

4) WP-Spamfree Plugin

This is my anti-spam method of choice and all of Compila’s blogs run this plugin. It is available at this URL - http://www.polepositionmarketing.com/library/wp-spamfree/ or by simply doing a search for the plugin via your WordPress administration area. It is highly efficient and blocks 99% of malicious comments. It also comes with a facility to block spam via a Contact Us form, which doesn’t require your visitor to enter any annoying Captcha image text.

Sometimes, it can be a bit over zealous, and on a few occasions it can block genuine comments. However there is a logging facility, which can be checked periodically and any genuine comments added back into your blog. The benefits in time saving far out way this rare inconvenience.

Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog!

I would love to hear if you have any other methods of keeping your Blog spam free or hear about your experiences on combating spam.

Thank you

Regards

Harvey