Do you Check your Spam for Ham?
We all want more comments on our blogs but when you’ve had a blog for just a few weeks the spam starts to come in. At first it’s just one or two here and there, not a great deal, but once you start getting a big tranche of visitors to your blog/website the spam starts to increase. At the moment on my blog I am getting 1 spam comment for every 4 real comments. This doesn’t seem like a great deal, but I am positive it’s going to get a lot worse the more I continue with my blogging.
Combat the Spam
One thing you can do if you are using WordPress is to install a spam plugin, I use Akismet which I pay for as I am a business, if you want to use it on a personal blog then it’s free. What I find quite funny for comments that are not spam, Akismet call them Ham. We all want more Ham don’t we?
Akismet catches spam quite well, but it also catches real (ham) comments and unless you check this regularly you could be missing some really good comments on your blog. There could be various reasons why a real comment has been caught in the spam filter, one of the top reasons is if the comment contains links.
On the Akismet website there is a short article called 5 things every blogger should know about spam, for more information about these check out the link to the list on the Akismet website.
1. Web spam is different from email spam.
2. Web spammers are social engineers.
3. Web spammers are basically advertising on your blog.
4. It’s all about the backlinks.
5. Spammers employ humans.
So back to my point, with this particular plugin it shows up on the dashboard how many spam comments have been caught. This is great, but it’s also difficult to work out whether there are any real comments in there unless you actively go in there each day and check it out. At first I didn’t consider there would be real comments in there, but when I clicked on it one day there were a few comments that had links which had been caught. It’s easy enough to mark them as not spam and then approve them, maybe with some edits if the comment is full of links.
Check Spam Regularly
Unfortunately when you get a lot of spam comments though the numbers build up and you can lose count of when you last checked the spam, so I find after 10 or 20 comments have been checked I delete them. Keeping track with low numbers is better I find.
I’d be interested in hearing your spam successes or problems?
If you’re interested in using comments on your blog in a great way, I wrote a post called Spread the Luv on your Blog! – it’s not all about combating spam on comments.
