Today, I would be sharing an hack on how to get rid of spam and unsolicited comments from appearing on your website. This article is applicable to WordPress websites but invariably, it also works for other web based platforms.

What are spam comments?

Although the definition of “Spam” is somewhat ambiguous and subjective according to context. Spam comments are basically any comment that doesn’t include specific content relevant to the post or subject matter.

I have worked with websites and content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Wix, etc. for over 7 years now. Over there years, I’ve noticed one thing common across these platforms which is Spam Comments. These comments might be made by custom software-bots or some humans who try to use the opportunity to advertise a product or share a piece of information in the bid to get traffic to their product or website. Other times, it is done just to get cheap backlinks to their website in order to improve their search engine optimization. However this way of getting cheap backlinks isn’t of great importance anymore because according to Google Search Console it might even have a negative effect on the webpage being spammed and the spammer also.

 Why Should I remove spam comments?

So you might be wondering why you should remove spam comments from your website if you don’t already know why. Well, spam comments can be harmful to your site. Here are some reasons why you should remove them:

1. It make you look more professional – If you are a business entity you might want to safe-guard the interest of you and your customers by protecting your integrity. It could happen a comment which contains some obscene word appeared on your website and some of your reader might find it offensive. You don’t want to put your business in a position that suggests you support something that is against your business values.
2. It promotes law and order – If you regularly moderate comments and penalize defaulters, you will be seen as disciplined and intentional about your actions. That way you would be able to maintain orderliness.
3. It saves time – Imagine you always have to moderate the comments made by your readers all the time. I tell you, this might wear you out at some point. It will become a daunting task when you have loads of comment waiting to be manually moderated by you.
4. Discourages other readers – A spam comment can annoy and discourage your readers if not properly attended to and in the long run reduce your site’s reputation. It can also distract your readers especially if they want to also drop a comment.Accumulated spam comments might deter your regular readers from commenting and give them the impression that you don’t read your comments or moderate the comment section of your site.
5. Negative impact – Google might remove or demote pages overrun with user-generated spam to protect the quality of our search results. Additionally, comments containing links dropped by spammers can sometimes lead to malicious sites that can affect the views of your readers negatively.

How to Identify Spam Comments

As stated before, the concept of spam comments is quite subjective so best way to define it is usually in terms of the context in question. You can easily recognize a spam comment when it doesn’t fit the context it is being introduced to. Sometimes, it is pretty easy to identify, other times, it gets difficult and technical. In the light of the above, I have some clues to help you identify some of these spam comments.

1. Rate real names over pseudo nicknames:
   In most cases, comments made by actual readers will be accompanied by real names. However this isn’t in all cases, you might still have to exercise your discretion when trying to judge which comment is real or not. Normally, a real user will have a profile and add his or her real names to back it up especially if they are really interested in your post and would love to be addressed appropriately when having a conversation.

   Additionally, make sure to look out for keywords embedded within names and or comments. For example. A user might use a name containing a keyword like “BestSwimSuit”. Apparently, this isn’t natural and it definitely a spam comment. Some spammers use this keyword strategy to get backlinks to their sites and divert traffic. This might hurt your site ranking as time goes.

2. Do Your Due Diligence:
   Sometimes, a comment made might contain one or more links and might actually be legitimate. You also have the responsibility of checking out these links to confirm if it might be related to the discourse in question. If it does and you are comfortably with the comment, then you can go ahead to keep it.
3. Relevancy to Context:
   In some cases, these spammers might use generic comments that can fit into any post without suggesting anything sinister e.g. “I love this post”, “Thank you for this”, or “Nice”. So what do you look out for when you see this? Watch comments like this closely and see if it has some links cloaked within it or how frequent it comes from the same sender. It is also possible it is spammy.

How to Remove Spam Comments

Modify Your Discussion Settings

You can modify your site’s discussion settings to properly manage your comments. Using the discussion setting on WordPress as an example, one way to do this is by setting it in a way that you or the site administrator(s) manually have to approve comments before they go live on your site.

Additionally, you can blacklist some words such as swear words or obscene languages from appearing on your site. You could as well block comments from particular IP addresses.

More so, you can decide to hold a comment in the moderation queue if it contains one or more links so you can review it for approval.

Activate Spam Filtering and Blocking

Make use of powerful tools to filter spam comments and block them from flooding your site. If your site is powered by the WordPress platform you could use Jetpack’s Askimet anti-spam filter tool to do this.

Another great tool you can use on your website is the Google reCAPTCHA tool for detecting false comments and entry in forms. reCAPTCHA by Google is a great tool to ward off unwanted spammer or spam bots from dropping illicit comments on your site.

reCAPTCHA works by setting up a challenge where a user identifies a group of related pictures correctly.

Once the user passes the challenge, the user can proceed to post the comment. Ordinarily, a spam bot or software wouldn’t be able to take such a challenge.

If the mentioned measures above are put in place, you should be sure to get rid of unwanted comments from your site.