The Media Shower blog is only a couple of months old, yet we’re already seeing daily attempts by bad grammar-using robots to weasel their way into our comments section. Thing is, they’re funny as heck. How can you spot spam comments? They’re usually the ones that seem like they’re written by Balki from “Perfect Strangers.”
Um, thanks, Tyncindisdima.
By the way, in case anyone was planning to register the screen name vergleich risikolebensversicherungen for our blog’s comment section, it’s taken.
Again, these are actual comments left on our blog posts about issues like how to get people to share your stuff and how to use content for marketing. We admit we’ve published some great pieces, but somehow these comments don’t ring true. So yes, as you may already know if you run a blog, spammers will eventually show up in the comments section looking to run their marketing jive by you in the form of seemingly flattering feedback. Their hopes are to increase their search engine rankings by flooding your blog with references to their business. But we’re not having that are we? No, we are not.
Sorry, Balki.
Recognize the Robot
Of course the first step in keeping your blog from becoming one giant spam sandwich is recognizing what’s phony. Awkward sentences, frequent misspellings, bizarre references, and links to commercial sites are often the hallmarks of imposter comments. Sometimes they’re subtle…
And sometimes they’re not. Note the user name in this one…
Hey, thanks for the feedback, High Quality!
Rest assured, after seeing a few of these pop up in your inbox you’ll become quite skilled at determining what’s real and what’s just really funny.
Slam the Spam
So you’ve identified what’s bogus and had a few laughs, but now you wanna keep it from coming to you in the first place. There are a number of tools you can find online to fight the bad guys with. WordPress offers several plugins you can use; some are free and some cost a few bucks. Google is well aware of comment spam, and they have a tag (rel=”nofollow”) for hyperlinks to keep those links from getting any credit when they rank sites in their search results. Blocking specific keywords from posts is a simple but very effective way to cut down on spam. If you’re seeing specific references for Viagra offers in your comments, you can ban fun words like “male enhancement.” Unless, that is, you run a blog about male enhancement. But I certainly wouldn’t know if there are any such sites. I mean, if you know of any, would you mind leaving the URL of one of them in the comments section below? Ya know, just so I can tell my boss I thoroughly researched this article.
Congrats. You are now you’re ready to block comment spam. Just remember: multiple defenses are always better than just one, so using a combination of the techniques listed above will give you the best chance at rejecting the robots and giving you more time to to savor the real comments when they do come along, like this one. Thanks, Shari!
