Your company’s blog posts are highly visible and attract a lot of comments. It’s a great way to interact with your customers and build brand loyalty.
Unfortunately, moderating these comments can be tedious and time-consuming.
If you have too many comments to handle, they can start taking up valuable time you could spend on developing your products or marketing your company.
In this article, we’ll show you how to deal with a comment spam.
We’ll show you how to find comment spammers, and then we’ll show you how to report spam comments to the authorities.
What is Spam?
There are a good deal of different spams, but in this article we’ll focus on comment spam.
Comment spam is when someone posts a comment to your blog post with no intention of providing value to your audience.
This can annoy your readers, and it can also hurt your SEO (search engine optimization) rankings.
How do you spot a comment spam? One way is to watch for fake comments.
A common example of this is when a spammer makes a post that appears to be from a real person, but then doesn’t add any value to the discussion or add any new information.
Here are signs of comment spam:
1. The Comment is Not Relevant to Your Blog Posts
It’s important to remember that the comment is not a blog post. This means that the comment should have some relevance to your blog post.
If it doesn’t, it will be difficult for you to use this information to find and remove spam comments.
Your search engine ranking is likely to suffer if you have many irrelevant comments on your blog.
If you have lots of spam comments, your readers will probably stop commenting and contributing to your blog.
Photo by Vojtech Okenka on Pexels.
2. The Comment Contains an Unwanted Link
A comment with an unwanted link is another sign of spam. Spam bots are notorious for posting unwanted links in comments.
These links can lead to phishing scams, malware downloads, or other threats.
One of the most common types of unwanted links is for “new” domains. They often name these new domains after some popular site, like CNN, eBay, or Yahoo.
This gives them a legitimate feel, and it is common for people to make a post asking about a link on these sites.
The problem is that the link leads to a malicious site instead of the legitimate one.
Other types of unwanted links include those that redirect you to a malicious website or install malware on your computer.
3. The Comment Contains Only Emoji or Other Non-Text Content
Comments that are all emoji or contain only images are also signs of spam.
If spammers fill your individual post with only emoji, or other non-text content, look into cleaning up your comment moderation.
You should immediately delete comments on posts with links or images that are in fact spam.
A post with a few hundred comments and only a few of them contain non-text content is not normal.
You should report this to the community team, who will investigate and remove the spammy comments.
4. The Comment Contains a Lot of Personal Information
Personal information is another sign of spam.
The best way to deal with this is to set up comment moderation on your blog, so that the comments that you allow will be more relevant and useful to your readers.
This will help you spot comment spammers more easily and weed out the unwanted links and personal information in your comments.
5. Any Comments That Don’t Add Value to Your Blog Post or Readers’ Discussion
This one is obvious, but it’s still worth mentioning.
Some spammers make sure that their spam comments don’t add any value or add nothing new to the discussion on your blog post by only posting non-related links, pictures, and other useless information in their comments.
If you notice this happening in your blog comments, it’s best to delete the comment and not allow any new comments from that spammer.
Your spam folder will thank you for it.
Photo by Vojtech Okenka on Pexels.
How to Reduce Comment Spam
The first step in dealing with comment spam is to report it. If you’re able to find the spammer, then you can also ask them to remove their comments.
In order to report comment spam, you’ll need a good spam reporting tool that can identify comment spammers and help you weed out the unwanted links and personal information in your comments.
To delete comment spam automatically, you can also use anti-spam plugins, such as Akismet or Titan.
Third-party comment system plugins like these are great because they let you automate dealing with comment spam.
It’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just report the spam comments. You should also use the same tools to remove them.
If it‘s too much for you, you can always disable comments.
And if it‘s your personal blogs instead of company blogs with lots of visitors, you can choose to moderate comments every few weeks or so.
Only Allow Legitimate Comments
We hope this article has given you some insight into how to deal with comment spam on your blog and how to use a spam reporting tool or plugin to help you deal with it automatically.
Check out our other blog posts on blogging and marketing to learn more about how to create content that attracts more traffic and leads!
