The Lowdown on Comment Spam
Nobody in the blogging community officially likes comment spam. Internet marketers who are engaging in Black Hat search engine marketing (SEM) are the very people who are trying to dump their comment spam upon your blog.
The naked truth is that your fellow SEMs are using advanced Black Hat techniques to make your blogging experience as miserable as possible. Why? Because they view comment spam as being part of their SEM job description.
Comment spam should thus be viewed as a low level security risk. In other words, outside forces are trying to put unwanted stuff on blogs, called comment spam, that neither Google nor the victims of comment spam actually want. Comment spam can be controlled. It is fairly easy to control comment spam. But, bloggers have to take action. Otherwise, their bogs will eventually be overwhelmed with comment spam.
What is Comment Spam?
While opinions vary, comment spam is always referring to the mass generation of automated comments left on blogs by spamming Web robots, spiders, crawlers, or bots. Additionally, comment spam always contain a lot of hyperlinks since it is nothing but a link building tactic. While some bloggers actually consider low quality comments left by human visitors promoting their blogs to be spam, this blog considers individually moderating comments too time consuming, to be a practical defense against comment spam.
Effective automated defenses against comment Spam can only be implemented by plugins.
Of course, a blogger has some control over comment spam by adjusting their blog’s comment options. Where comments can be set to be accepted from virtually anybody to the other extreme of not accepting comments at all from anybody. But, any way you set it up comment moderation will always be a time consuming process. In reality, comment moderation offers very little protection from the mass generation of automated comment spam.
While Akismet is the first line of defense against comment spam in WordPress blogs, anybody who has ever used it knows that something else is required. Using Akismet by itself results in large volumes of flagged comments requiring time consuming moderation.
Bloggers basically have the option of either installing some type of a CAPTCHA plugin, or some other type of plugin that works invisibly in the background trying to detect bot activity. Either way, these types of comment spam protection plugins will check comments or commenters on an individual basis.
CAPTCHA Plugins Protect Against Comment Spam
A CAPTCHA or Completely Annoying Public Turing Test to Tell Computers andHumans Apart are very annoying to legitimate commenters. In addition, they are not as fool proof as they may seem since spammers have developed ways of defeating them.
Anti-Evil Bot Plugins Protect Against Comment Spam
While the other types of background plugins suffer from false positives, where legitimate commenters have been known to have been blocked from commenting with a 403 Forbidden Access error because something about them appears to indicate either a suspicious or harvester bot, or comment spammer. These types of background security plugins will often cover the broader areas of user registration and protection against content scraping.
