Most of the comments I get on my WordPress blog are spam! Fortunately, I have a useful plugin by the name of Akismet that filters out most of them, otherwise I’d be wasting a lot of my precious time each day going through them all.
Akismet does a great job of detecting spam, but sometimes I get comments that are not marked as spam but are very suspicious. Here’s a sample of some comments that catch my attention. Let’s see if you can detect what is wrong with them…
“I am really loving the theme/design of your blog.
Do you ever run into any internet browser compatibility problems?
A couple of my blog readers have complained about my blog not operating correctly in Explorer but looks great in Opera.
Do you have any ideas to help fix this problem?“
“Having read this I thought it was really informative.
I appreciate you finding the time and effort to put this article together.
I once again find myself spending a significant amount of time both reading and posting comments.
But so what, it was still worth it!“
“Hi everybody, here every person is sharing these kinds of knowledge, so it’s good to read this blog, and I used to visit this web site all the time.“
Now, can you tell me why these comments set off a red flag in my mind?
They are all generic comments!
These comments an easily be copied and pasted onto ANY blog. And that is exactly what is being done! In fact, I was having a conversation with another blogger recently and he commented that he was getting a lot of similar comments on his blog also.
You might be thinking, “Who cares?!” I care, and here’s why; I don’t want anyone abusing my site to get there’s to rank better, but more importantly, it will hurt my blog’s SEO if I’m back linking (through spam comments) to sites that are known to be of a suspicious character.
Okay, many genuine comments will be generic in nature. These you do not want to delete. The question then is, how can you tell the difference?
Here’s how I’ve learned to tell the difference:
1. Genuine comments will usually be in someone’s name. Spam comments will have a keyword phrase as the name.
2. Genuine comments will be grammatically correct. Spam comments will have obvious grammatical errors.
3. Genuine comments will have a simple URL backilnk or no backlink at all. Spam comments have backlinks to sites in obscure countries and/or too many backlinks.
Found this article helpful or have an opinion you’d like to express? Leave a (non-spammy) comment below! 😉