7 Ways To Catch Sneaky Spammers

Credit: laynecom @ Stock.xchng

Everyone who has owned a fairly popular blog has had to deal with spam comments one way or another. Solutions such as Akismet can capture a ton of spam comments coming your way. But they won’t stop everything. Spammers are always changing their tactics and relying on more sophisticated bots to penetrate your blog’s defense system and leave their garbage on your website. That’s why bloggers should think twice about allowing all comments to get published without any moderation.

If you have tried anti-spam plugins in the past and want to go beyond those to keep your community clean of spammers, you need to pay attention to these 7 items in comments you receive on your blog:

1. anchor text: if people are not using their name to leave a comment on your blog, they are probably spamming. Some people do like to comment on other sites using their site’s name.  I am personally somewhat lenient towards these folks. But in most cases, these types of comments should be deleted too.
2. comment link: you should always check to see what links people are using as they leave their comments on your website. It does not matter how great people’s comments are. If they are linking to a Viagra website, your site could get in trouble. Some people prefer removing and banning these types of commenters altogether. Others just get rid of the problem link or ask for a replacement link. You won’t catch these unless you check outgoing links in your comments.
3. content: I don’t know about you, but I appreciate all the positive feedback that people send my way on my blog. Spammers know that is the case with most bloggers. That is why they use automated positive messages to get their comments and links posted to your site. Some people even include links to malicious websites in their comments. You are better off deleting these comments.
4. links in content: going back to the previous point, you should pay attention to all the links included inside comments (not just in the URL section) on your website. Some links could be beneficial for your readers even if they are going to your competitors’ websites. But if someone is sandwiching high quality comments with spammy links, you will have to drop the hammer on them.
5. robotic language: the fastest way to get banned on my sites is using a robot to leave a comment. Robots are not smart enough to come up with new things to say. If you watch your comments long enough, you can almost tell which commenters are web-bots and which ones are not.
6. unrelated comment or question: a lot of spammers are sophisticated enough to not make the above mistakes. Some spammers do make the mistake of posting their comments to the wrong pages on your site. It is not that hard to determine which comments are completely unrelated to your blog posts. In most cases, I remove these types of comments just to make sure these folks don’t get over my “auto-approval” threshold for comments.
7. thank you comments: this is very similar to the 3rd point in this list. In the past few months, I must have gotten thousands of comments thanking me about what a good job I am doing on this site. The trouble is many of them look identical. If these were real people, they would not use the exact same paragraphs on my sites. You have probably seen these types of comments too. While you don’t want to be rude, you are probably better off removing these bots from your community.

Spam is not fun to deal with. Anti-spam plugins and the above tactics can help you filter out as many spammy comments as possible and keep your community clean for longer.