Stop Blog Comment Spam with Word Verification

As I just discussed in my post about comment moderation, blog comment spam can be a real problem for bloggers trying to maintain a high standard of content quality and prevent unwanted posters from clogging up their comments with commercial pitches for their own spammy sites. In addition to enabling content moderation, another useful feature that can help stop comment spammers is word verification. Most reputable blogging software should provide this option; in Blogger, it's available in the Comments section of the Settings tab in the blog dashboard.

What is word verification, exactly? It's a feature that forces all commenters to enter a word or a random series of letters presented in an image file each time they want to post a comment. If the letters aren't entered correctly, the comment can't be posted. By placing the letters inside a graphic file rather than as standard HTML text, the verification feature prevents them from being read by automated scripts often used by comment spammers to post comments on thousands of blogs at once. If the spam software can't read the letters, there's no way it can post a comment. This is a quick and easy way to stop lots of automated spam bots that would otherwise start dumping unwanted crap in your comments.

Of course, an unusually dedicated comment spammer will actually take the time to enter the comment manually, read off the letters and submit their comment by hand. That's why you need comment moderation switched on as well, so you can individually review each comment that's posted.

The big question in the future will be whether spam software can be programmed to read the letters in those image files. In my opinion it's really a question of when, rather than if, this is going to happen. In the spam arms race, clever coders are always at work trying to crack the latest obstacle to them launching an avalanche of spam (a spamalanche?). When the incentive is big enough - and the ability to comment on thousands of blogs for free is a pretty big incentive - someone's eventually going to figure out a way to do it. But for the time being, word verification should do the trick and stop most automated content spammers. So make sure it's switched on!

Key terms: word verification, verfication, verifcation, automated, comment, spam, script, software, spammers

Moderate Your Comments!

Any blog that's been up for a while, allows comments, and has at least a reasonable amount of online visibility will eventually run into the problem of unwanted comments being posted by complete strangers. These commenters are usually out to accomplish one thing: get a link back to their own blog or website and siphon away some of your visitors. They're often running automated scripts or software that allow them to post comments on a vast scale, leaving their spammy messages and links throughout the blogosphere, and annoying bloggers and their readers by introducing a jarring and unpleasant distraction to their blog enjoyment.

It used to be that leaving comments with a link back to your own site would help your search engine rankings, since they counted each comment as a new backlink and therefore a virtual "vote" in favor of that site's importance. But since this led to a deluge of blog spam, Google and other search engines have cracked down by adding a "no follow" tag to blog comment links, which prevents them from being tracked by the search engine crawlers and therefore negates the search optimization angle for blog comment spammers.

But they're still out there, looking for the free traffic that thousands of comment links can bring them. How do you catch them before they stink up your comments sections with the spammy ravings? Turn on your comment moderation feature! Any decent blog software should offer this option. In Blogger, for example, you can find it in the Comments section of the Settings tab on your blog dashboard. Switch it on and all potential comments will be routed to your email for you to review and approve or disapprove before being posted on your blog. This will help ensure that every comment added to your blog posts is a wanted comment, and not some weirdo spammer trying to sell your readers cheap Viagra or fraudulent stock tips or a second mortgage or larger genitalia. Do your readers need these things? In general, probably not.

Key terms: comments, moderation, spam, scripts, software, backlinks, search optimization, moderater, moderateing