blog spam

One easy way to tell if a comment is spam is to copy/paste the content into a Google search. Often you’ll find hundreds of blog comments with the exact same text posted by a similar name. You can also look for things like “names” that are actually company names or other keywords, commenters who leave links to their own site in the text of the comment, etc.

Once you’re familiar with the sort of thing they tend to write, you’ll be able to spot it instantly. As for what they’re trying to achieve, most of the time the answer is backlinks to their own site. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but spammers are sadly a fact of the internet.

Unless you’ve uninstalled it, your blog should have the Akismet plugin already installed. Enabling this will help to filter out future spam messages, which can be a lifesaver as your blog grows in popularity.