If you’re new to WordPress, then you may imagine that spam is limited to just what you get in your email box, offering creams and pills to decrease your waist and increase your… um, other things. Eh-hem. Once you own a blog, spam can take on a whole new meaning and be even more of an annoyance that requires constant vigilance.
Not only do you want to protect your readers from offensive “comments” about where to find free you-know-what, but even more importantly Google considers spammy comments part of your content! And the big G will dock your page rank if it finds too much undesirable content.
After the jump, we’ll discuss moving beyond Akisment to protect your blog from spam.
If you’re familiar with WordPress, you probably have a good understanding of the popular plugin Akismet, which does a great job in the fight against WordPress spam. Effectively, Akismet works by reviewing all comments on your blog and determining whether or not its spam. If by chance Akismet marks a comment as spam that isn’t, it’s a simple job to approve the comment so that it shows on your post.
Akismet is the top dog for de-spamifying WordPress websites and for small sites, it’s probably enough. However, if you run a busy site with lots of traffic, then it’s a good plan to have several weapons in your aresenal.
One of the primary spam comments you’ll receive are trackbacks. To prevent trackback spam, you can upload the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin for WordPress. The plugin seeks to filter trackbacks left on your blog. As you grow your audience and get more trackbacks, you can create filters and options as to what websites you want to allow trackbacks.
A little known tool that is new to WordPress is WP Spam Hitman. This tool is unique in how you control the plugin’s parameters. Many spammers use specific words in their spam comments and trackbacks and you can choose which words to let it look out for.
The last tool that I want to discuss is Defensio. Defensio is a sophisticated anti-spam plugin, in which it learns the behaviors of you and your readers to fight WordPress spam. Since it is an all-in-one solution, it’s encouraged that you disable other spam plugins while using it. It’s important to get an idea of how strict you want the plugin to be on your comments. In the options, you can set the plugin to prevent spam that is above a certain “spaminess”.
