Launching and maintaining a blog for your brand’s content marketing and SEO tactics entails many responsibilities. And among them, content creators and bloggers are tasked to regularly produce and publish content, frequently engage with followers, share content across the social Web, and keep the blog and the brand safe from any form of intrusions. Online, these “intrusions” can come in different forms—from viruses (or is it “virii?”), malicious phishing sites, and Web spam.

Spam is unfortunately everywhere online. Some carry poisoned links to dangerous Web sites, others simply point to some unrelated site in hopes of boosting their SEO scores through backlinks. They’re in your e-mail’s inbox, they’ve latched themselves onto many Web sites, and they’re on your blog’s comment section. Comment spam can cause negative effects on your blog’s online presence, pulling down its search engine rankings, and exposing your actual users to their poisoned links. Here are five easy ways you can combat comment spam on your blog.


Set Interaction Policies
Define a series of interaction rules on your blog. This provides your real site visitors with a guideline to help them interact better with you, as well as to warn potential spammers and trolls of what you’ll do should they put a toe over the line. And while spam comments may be software-generated, they are still set by people who may have deliberately chosen your blog for their plans. To these people, interaction policies may serve as the first warning, so to speak, that their spamming efforts will be for naught.

Image by Danny Nicholson

Turn off Comment Auto-Approve
A lot of bloggers often overlook site customizations, including comment settings. Here, you should take note of comment authorization and make sure that your blog doesn’t automatically authorize and publish comments as they come.


Moderate Your Comments
It may be a lot of work, but having to sit down and go through every comment on your blog posts can prove to be a good practice for filtering them for spam. Just look through the list of comments your new post/s have garnered to sort out the spam from the sincere reader comments. You can even make it a part of your blogging and reader engagement habits every morning to make it less strenuous.


Install Anti-Spam Plugins
If your blog is hosted on WordPress, there are a lot of plugins you can install that can help filter through and prevent comment spam. Akismet, for instance, offers a nice layer of protections against comment spam by comparing comments to a spam database it maintains itself. Anything it catches, it simply quarantines to let you sneak a peek and confirm if they are indeed spam or someone with really bad grammar just left you a genuine comment.


Ban Offending IP Addresses
For repeat offenders and for those with seriously nasty comment spam implementations, perhaps it’s best to consider banning their IP addresses from your blog. However, since this may require some code and server diddling under the hood, it’s best if you leave this to the expert from your Web team. Once implemented, you can stop these malicious activities from occurring so you can focus your attention on other important things. 

Tags: Blogging, internet marketing, Security, social media marketing, Spam