Holy Cow! Spam Comments Crashed My Website

Is it common for your auto blog post to create a SPAM frenzy?

I got this question today from a previous client who thought her SPAM Comment problem came from adding more content on her blog using our service.  Although I guess it could be argued if one didn’t have any content at all, then adding content, however it gets there would open opportunities for comment spam to exist.  However, it’s pretty clear that spam comments on a WordPress website is a problem that extends across the globe.

Just to clarify, this client had her own WordPress website and we just provided our Engagement Content Channel ghost-written to her website.  Since we didn’t build her website, we weren’t able to change her blog settings as we do for our SMARTblog clients.

Here was my response:

I’m sorry to hear about your site crashing.   It sounds like your site got targeted by a spam comment robot.

Comment spam is a common issue with WordPress websites and has nothing to do with our service.  The more content you publish, the more opportunities there are for comment spammers to use your website to create back links. (Which is why they do it.)

Check out this link from WordPress:  http://codex.wordpress.org/Comment_Spam

We turn off blog comments automatically for all of our clients in order to prevent comment spam.  There are a number of other ways to encourage client engagement that don’t require blog comments, and comments don’t really help your website as much as they help create back links for the people who post comments.  Unless you have a high volume of legitimate comment related conversations going on with clients, I’d suggest you turn off all comments on your site as well.

Alternatively, you can activate Akismet, which is a blog comment spam filter run by the folks at Automattic (who also own and run WordPress).  This comes installed on every WP blog and you just need an activation key.

Lastly, as your voice mail indicates, there are other options like requiring commentators to register before posting comments.  This will stop robots, but many people pay employees overseas to manually post a ton of comment spam, and they will take the time to register to get the comments on your site.

You’d probably want to prevent any comments from going live before a moderator verifies them if you really want to leave commenting open, but then this takes a lot of non-productive time unless you outsource the management of comments yourself.

I’ve purposely left comments open on this post if anyone has something real and meaningful to say….