Habitually Good

If you feel this way, you are not alone. There is a lot of comment spam on the Internet these days and blogs which allow anonymous comments (Such as mine) bear the worst of it.

According to Akismet (one of the best Anti-Spam service around) more than 90% of the comments that are left on blogs are Spam. A fact experienced by the blogger who made the cartoon that you see here (click the image to visit his blog). Just to illustrate further how big this problem is, here’s a look at a graph from Akismet’s site which shows the total number of Spam Comments over time:

Scary, right? So, how to minimize spam on your blog? Here are my tips (and these don’t apply to very high traffic bloggers, I am sure, but then which of those visit this blog anyway).

Tips to minimize Spam Comments on your Blog

• Get Akismet – I can’t stress this enough. The sheer number of spam that Akismet blocks for you is enough reason to install it. On this blog, I have received over 400 legit comments (since it started), and in the same time, Akismet has blocked over 17500 spam comments. Convinced? Akismet is available for all blogging platforms (almost).
• Use WordPress to it’s potential – WordPress itself presents a number of techniques to fight Comment Spam. Since Akismet is a learning service and it does miss out on some spam. WordPress provides 2 very effective ways to block spam comments: Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist. You can use these two techniques to minimize your comment spam. Follow that link for details on how to use these features.
• Close Comments - there is simple feature on WordPress which allows you to control on a post-by-post basis whether comments and trackbacks are allowed for that post. I have noticed that some of my older posts attract more spam then any other. These are posts where no one leaves legitimate comments anyway. So, I simply edit them and disable comments and trackbacks on these posts. While I could install plugins which would automatically do this for all my posts older than a certain period, I still like to keep control on this on a post by post basis. Drop me a comment if you are not sure how to disable comments on a post.

Finally, there is one more proven way to reduce comment spam (proven because I have experienced it). This method is not easy because it requires you to get a lower Google Page Rank. I had posted a while ago on how my comment spam reduced to a great extent when my PR was set to 0 from 3. Well, I was correct, because since my PR is back to 3 again, my comment spam has gone up to a few 100 a week (while it was 3-5 a week when I was PR 0).

And that’s it. Happy Spam Fighting.

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