What Makes A WordPress Comment Spam

Comment spam on a WordPress site is something I continue to struggle with. The more popular your WordPress site gets and the more posts you get with a high page rank, the more your WordPress site becomes a target for the spammers. How do you tell what is and isn’t a spam comment? Well, some are obvious and some are left to your better judgment.

I have taken steps on this site to reduce comment spam and if you actually read the fine print just above the comment area on single posts here, you will read what I consider a legitimate comment. I even get some comments saying how they are offended by this site’s comment policy. Sorry if I want to keep the spam and unneeded crap off the posts and only show valuable content. Read the post and if you don’t have anything to offer then I hope it helped you. Hey nobody is forcing you to comment so if you don’t like the policy or have no value to add to the conversation then move on.

Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t have much patience for long-winded fluff-filled details. All I want are the facts, I guess it is my way of keeping my limited capacity brain from filling up with unnecessary crap. So goes most of my posts and that is probably what drives my comment policy. So what makes a comment spam?

For this site, any comment that isn’t relevant to the post is considered spam. Some are easily recognizable and some are not. With more and more scripts available to generate comments to spam blogs for backlinks, I had to resort to moderate all comments, meaning that no comment will appear that isn’t personally approved. So what is a spam comment?

Here are some easily recognizable comment spam complete with the misspelling:

• Thanks for this helpful blog.
• I agree with you. Your tips are wonderful!
• thank you !
• is recession time but we have to keep our heads up.good luck to everyone
• Hi, I have just discovered your blog and I feel my RSS reader will love it !
• Oooo! This is a point mentioned. I like when everything in place while it is understandable to mere mortals.
• Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. Cheers!
• keep doing great job.good luck to everyone
• very helpful.will come back again when I have more time.work keep me busy.
• good info,thanks, ur info
• The author continued with the same spirit.
• dude. You’re cool. Your comments are always welcome – nice and not snarky but not boring either.I am certainly not that way in the post but try.
• Fully agree with you, about a week ago, wrote about etozhe on your blog!.
• Interesting!
• May I …
• not bad …

No matter if these are script generated or not it doesn’t matter to me anymore. These are not adding value to my readers and therefore considered spam. And then there are those that can barely put together a coherent sentence, sorry no link for you! And those that use some form of text language instead of actual words, sorry if you can’t at least try to type real words. No Link For You!

Another form of what I consider comment spam are what I call Drive-By Comments. A drive-by comment is really not automatically generated but is not adding any value. Some are easily identified like asking a question based on the title of the post but their question is actually answered in the post’s content if only they read it. Sorry Skippy… No Link For You!

So what is the point here? Is this a post to just bitch, well yes and no. The post is to call all decent bloggers to stand up against comment spam and not allow them to continue to fill up our WordPress sites with useless junk!