A blog post can have a significant impact on your business, if it receives the right attention. However, spam comments left by people who want to advertise their products or services can hurt your blog’s performance and lead to a drop in traffic.
In this article we’ll show you how to combat spam comments so that they don’t affect your blog’s performance.
First let’s take a look at why these spam posts are problematic for bloggers.
You may not be aware of this, but spam comments can really hurt your blog. Not only do they make it difficult for humans to read your content, but they also eat up the bandwidth on your site and take away from how quickly you can load pages.
The best way to avoid spam comments is by installing a comment plugin that will automatically delete any suspect message before it even gets published. This helps keep your site running smoothly without slowing down page loading times!
This article will teach you how to install one of these plugins so that you don’t have to worry about spammers coming in and ruining things for everyone else.
Blogging has become a popular way to share one’s thoughts with the world, but it can be hard to manage everything that goes into running a blog. One of these things is fighting spam comments on one’s website.
What are Spam Comments?
This article focuses on recent issues relating to the growth of online commenting, especially in light of the rise of sites like Twitch.tv and reddit.com
Spam comments are often identified by their lack of substance or lack of context to the topic at hand. This is because most are simply trying to sell advertising space via AdSense or are trying to share a link.
There are ways of preventing spam comments, but many times these result in the removal of possibly valuable contributions to an article or community discussion. This is why it’s so important for sites like Twitch and reddit to implement appropriate policies and guidelines before they grow too big.
The problem with most cases of spamming, however, is that spam comments are often written by hackers or other computer criminals trying to steal your password or personal information.
For example, some types of malware use spam messages in order to trick you into clicking links which may download dangerous programs directly onto your computer.
Spam comments are often identified by their lack of substance or lack of context to the topic at hand. This is because most are simply trying to sell advertising space via AdSense or are trying to share a link.
There are ways of preventing spam comments, but many times these result in the removal of possibly valuable contributions to an article or community discussion. This is why it’s so important for sites like Twitch and reddit to implement appropriate policies and guidelines before they grow too big.
How to Stop Spam Comments?
I have been dealing with WordPress spam lately. I will summarize the steps I took to stop it from happening, and how you can keep your site from being spammed too.
It all started a few weeks ago when I wrote a post on my blog about a popular pick-up artist website. The article got a lot of attention – thousands of visitors, hundreds of comments.
But then one day I noticed something really strange in my Google Analytics account. All these new visitors were coming from the same IP address range! Not only that, but they were all searching for some popular terms within my post’s subject domain. For example “how to seduce women” or “seduced by a woman”.
My first impression was that someone had broken into my site and was mass-posting spam comments to a list of other websites. I looked through the referrer logs and saw a ton of links from this IP address, all going to other sites within my niche.
In order to confirm my suspicions, I turned on WordPress’s comment moderation and enabled comment filtering. I decided to add a custom filter (via the “My filters” box) that would only allow certain words to be posted, and all other comments would be held for moderation.
I added a list of around 1000 popular English words that I thought would be allowed, along with another 1000 or so common phrases.
Then started the fun part – letting the mass spam comments hit my site.
And it worked! The vast majority of these new visitors were never able to post their spam messages because one of my custom filters caught it. I received one or two legitimate comments, and the rest were filtered as spam.
What are the Factors Affecting Comments?
image credit- Pixabay
There are a lot of things that can have an impact on comments when you’re building a website, and when you’re in this stage it’s important to look at them all. Some of these factors are within your control, others will be out of your reach thanks to user behavior, but it’s still helpful to know what factors are important to think about.
Let’s talk about some of the main factors that affect comments on your website today. First up, let’s look at age.
Age affects community
The first factor is age. If you have a website with an older audience, you will need more mature moderation tools. That’s because older audiences like to use their real names and talk about serious things.
This is the easiest kind of moderation tool to create since it can be made in a few minutes with built-in tools like Disqus Custom Field. Getting the necessary information from users when they sign up is simple: name, email address, and website URL.
Then, in the moderation tools, you can require them to pick their name from a preloaded list of users before they publish comments, stopping any impersonation or identity theft in its tracks. You can also view IP addresses for all your users in this section, so if someone is using a proxy server to get around restrictions you’ll know.
Getting an older audience to use your moderation tools can be tough, but the best way is to make it clear that you value their opinions.
You can do this by posting on sites like Reddit or Hacker News, which are popular with older audiences. If you get the right kind of attention there (like pointing out a new feature), you can improve user engagement with your website and get more comments.
The opposite is true if you have a younger audience. Younger audiences, for example, those on Twitch, use their real names less often. Since they’re using something other than their full legal name, blocking tools won’t work as well, so moderation should be lighter or completely absent.
A great way to solve this problem is by moderating comments in off-hours. For example, if you’re building a site for Twitch viewers, you’ll know that they like to stay up late at night. You can moderate comments during the daytime when your moderators are available, then review them during the night when everyone’s sleeping and no one will notice.
This tactic can be used with older audiences too if you have a popular enough website that you need to moderate comments all hours of the day. In this case, simply moderate in off-peak times when there aren’t many people online looking at your site.
You should also take care when asking about age during registration. Users who are uncomfortable with providing their real-world age might choose not to register, or they could even try faking their age in the registration form.
Age is one of the most important factors in building effective moderation tools, but there are others too. Next up let’s look at gender. Gender affects community
Gender is another factor that affects comments. That’s because women are usually the ones writing the majority of comments on almost any website.
When you’re looking into gender in moderation, it’s important to know that there are two different problems you need to solve. The first is harassment. If your site has many female users, you should take special care when creating your moderation tools so that they experience.
For example, if you become a victim or people who do not like you use something unfair against you, it will be difficult for you to counterattack. Also, if you take an unfavorable position, it will be difficult to explain your reasons. Especially if English is not used well enough to make a statement, the victim will lose his/her chance of rebuttal and think that he/she was unfairly judged by himself or herself. On the other hand, when you keep on posting in one place when you are angry, it will be seen as immaturity or irrationality. This can also lead to emotional instability at the site in question. Quick Links Brands are always looking for new ways to engage with their customers, and social media is a great way of doing so. But not all engagement strategies work equally well; in fact, some can actually do more harm than good. A recent study by the University of California Berkeley found that spam comments on company blogs could decrease blog performance by as much as 80%. Luckily there’s an easy solution – ClearEngage helps brands stop these spammers from ever getting through! If you want help eliminating your comment feed or protecting it against future attacks, reach out today to learn how ClearEngage can protect your brand online. There are many ways you can get your blog noticed and attract more readers. You could create fantastic content like we’ve discussed, use SEO to rank higher in search engines, or share links with influencers and authority sites. But there is one thing that will surely destroy your success; spam comments on blogs! Blogs often have a form field for reader feedback at the end of posts but they may not realize how this impacts their site performance if it becomes overrun by spammers. What are the Negative Factors of Comments?
1) Ability to perform comment is limited
2) Victim will be exposed to cyberbullying and moral hazard attacks
3) It may be difficult to explain the root cause when something is active within a limited period of time
Conclusion- How Spam Comments Can Hurt Your Blog’s Performance 2024
