Comment Bot Graffiti is Bad
Managing comment spam on your blog
If you have a blog on your website, or maybe you author an authority blog, then you surely remember that first comment you received from some nice person you don’t know with nice things to say about your content.
Then… another one... but the english was a bit busted
And… another one... with a link to a viagra supplier in India.
But then one of your students leaves a nice comment about something you posted among the accruing posts from the unknown. Then some fellow from Romania with a link to a site with content that you makes you want to vomit.
In this article, I’m going to explain what’s happening and how you can prevent this all too common occurrence of “comment spam” from overwhelming your site and damaging your reputation and traction on SERPs, (search engine result pages).
Unlike to common email spam, comment spam is basically unsolicited messages from commercial or malicious origins somewhere online targeting the comments section of your blog. Most likely their point of origin is far from you and have never heard of your business, nor care. Also, they are most likely placed on your site by Comment Bots, the most common tactic for the spread of this type of spamming. It’s an ultra-efficient automated way of packing hundreds of comments into blogs that aren’t configured properly.
So why is this bad for your Dojo and why should you even care?
- First, it’s dangerous and can damage your business. Period. Unmonitored comments can contain extremely graphic content that you don’t want prospective students to see. You will lose credibility immediately.
- Comment spam can contain attachments, which when clicked on can bury malware into your unsuspecting audience who trust your site. The search engines know this, and if your site has questionable links, they will not send their traffic to you.
- Same goes for links that point to hazardous or questionable pages. Often times these pages contain content that isn’t relevant to your audience and can contain pornography or fundamentalist crap. If those links that are accumulating on your site contain links, your site is getting ranked down on google. That’s bad.
- You want comments, not just purely for the advantage of student and prospect engagement, but also for the SEO benefits your comment section provides. But non-relevant comments drive the good traffic away and discourage engagement. Search engines recognize content not relevant to search queries and thus won’t direct their searches to your site. You don’t want Google thinking you’re cool with links with bad content.
- Accumulation of all this content can suck up your bandwidth. While this may not be a big issue with most simple sites, as the evolution of video centric sites grows, bandwidth conservation becomes more of a priority. With thousands of comments on a blog post, it’s load time will be slower.
- Not all comment spam is malicious. In fact, I’d say most are not. Most comment spam is piggy-backing on your blog page to target search engine visibility by creating links to their site. Basically, when google sees links on blogs, their algorithm identifies this link as relevant to an existing discussion. This gives the link more value and thus bumps it up in the ranking. It’s an old tactic that Google is constantly battling, but quickly bypassed by spammers.
Fighting The Vandals
So now you understand the origin of comment spam and why they’re targeting your blog. You also understand the potential damage that ignoring this can have on your school. Let’s look at some immediate steps you can take right now to prevent this from happening.
- Manage and moderate your content or don’t have a comment section. Don’t hand this off to some teenage student or your significant other. You control this! Keep an eye on who’s engaging with your comments and be sure to immediately take action when something questionable is posted.
- For WordPress users, activating your Akismet plugin is probably the smartest thing you can do. Basically, without this plugin installed, you have no chance against SPAM. This is your on-board SPAM filter that is so recommended by WordPress, it come pre-installed. Activate the app and go through the simple instructions and plugin the API key. Do not miss this point.
- Disable HTML Comments by downloading the Peter's Literal Comments plugin. Once installed and activated, all HTML comments will be filtered through WordPress. Basically, it’s going to look for specific code irregularities that are common in spam and block them from being published.
- Disable commenting on media files like photos. No seriously, there’s no need for this.
- Disable Trackbacks. There really isn’t a reason I can think of why a martial art school owner would need trackbacks and disabling this will eliminate a large portion of comment spam. For WordPress, it’s super simple. Go to Settings / Discussion and disable trackbacks (if you want), site wide.
- For WordPress users, in Settings / Discussion close comments older than 30 days. This will not allow comment bots to publish their spam on your older comments.
- Straight up disable your comments. Seriously. If this is all too much you to manage, shut it off. Or better yet, if you're that person who's too busy for prioritizing audience engagement (sarcasm), then simply don't use WordPress. Consider another platform like Weebly.
Let me share an example of one of my consulting clients and some discoveries I quickly made the moment I logged into his company's site.
As you can see, their site has accumulated over 37,000 comments, 33k of which are approved and visible, blanketing every post in their blog.
Now let me point out that these guys are as solid as steel when it comes to customer service and education. They are super active in delivering massive quality to their audience and deserve killer ranking. But they hired an artist to build their site and were pretty ignorant to this risk here.
Above are examples of links to sites that have zero relevancy to my client's site. Who knows where these links lead to.
You'll also notice to the right that there are attachments. Chances are it's a simple image to boost recognition, but the risk is certainly there. I'd be very willing to bet that with the density of spam impregnated into this blog, there are links to malicious points.
If you have this problem, make it a priority to erase this content now and prevent it from happening in the future. There's no excuse.
My immediate recommendation is a WordPress plugin called WP-Optimize, a superior database clean-up and management tool. There are a ton out there, but this will get you started.
I'm interested in hearing your comments on comment bots, spam and what you've experienced. As well, I'd love to hear some other solutions from my colleagues who have discovered solutions that are working.
