How to Remove SPAM in WordPress

How to spare your innocent eyes the onslaught of spam.

Dealing with comment and form spam in WordPress and other sites, is a daily task for most of us.  But I find that the spammers are getting smarter and sneakier and I want to protect YOU from THEM.  Here’s the why and how to stop spam in WordPress, specifically.

Spam Devalues your Site

When you are searching out the legitimacy of a site, what do you do?  I have a quick look for content that makes sense, I look for ridiculous over-use of keywords and nonsensical links.  If I find a lot of spam comments, or completely un-moderated content, I don’t trust that site. And I will rarely, if ever, return.  The content of our site, and our engagement with our readers is paramount!  Letting spam into your site, is like leaving garbage on the coffee table when you have friends over for tea.

Plus, it is annoying and distracting when comments with **** are in the middle of a discussion on our toddler’s halloween costume. Or worse, there are 40 lines of text about a certain body part’s enlargement.  Downright perturbing!

Spam is bad for your Site’s SEO

By default, WordPress adds a “nofollow” tag to your commenters’ links.  There are plugins that ‘reward commenters’ by turning off the nofollow but that is a bad idea.  Lots of outbound links can ‘bury’ your legitimate and helpful links.  Of course no one knows for certain how Google values links today or how they will tomorrow.  But one thing is for certain – they do their best to DEVALUE spammy links and sites that intentionally promote spam.When you let comment spam slip through your moderation and onto your site, you can significantly hurt your search engine rankings.  You need to recognize spam and get rid of it.  We’ll show you how.

Recognizing Spam in WordPress

The obvious spam – 40 lines on body parts, or 200 links – should be easily caught by WordPress plugins/spam filters and your innocent eyes can be spared.  The problem is that spammers have become connoisseurs at the compliment/argument approach.  How many times have you received an odd comment from Asdf, linked to myspammysite.com that says, “This is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks to you!”?  Of course not everyone whose native tongue is other-than-English is a spammer.  So wiping out all comments due to incorrect grammar isn’t a good idea either.  (I’m sure most of my comments left on your sites wouldn’t make it in that case!)  Things to check:

• website link- is it relevant to comment or owner?
• commenter name – does it look real?
• comment itself – is it relevant?

Approving spammers “comments” is condoning what they’re doing – lets not do that, k?

Getting rid of spam in WordPress

For WordPress webmasters we recommend that you check your settings to prevent spammers from leaving an irrelevant comment to your site.

1.  Under Settings>> Discussion >>Comment Moderation:

Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 2 or more link

Add a spammer’s ip address or url in the Comment Blacklist box field.

2.  When using a comment filtering plugin – be sure to mark the comment as “spam” – do not simply “trash” it.  Your plugins are likely ‘smart’ meaning that they’re learning from your spammed comments and will get better at screening the comments.

3.  Use CAPTCHA if you’re receiving a massive amount of comment spam