This generation can be called as an era of bloggers in the history of World Wide Web. Many people, companies start their so-called blogs in order to share their views or business related stuff. Along with the rise of popularity of blogs, spammers too are growing at a rage. So firstly if you are a blogger especially if you use self hosted WordPress blogs then you might be victim of spam comments.

Spam is nothing but some bulk comments sent to some huge number of blogs to get traffic, advertise their products, services etc. Your blog too could receive few comments from a spammer(spammer could be human or a bot). As soon as you see some comments to be moderated in your dashboard don’t be too quick to approve them.

You get  spam comments instead of original comments, If your blog is not protected with spam prevention plugins. If you are not using any plugin then you must be able to judge a comment whether it is genuine or a spam manually.

How to identify a spam comment

1. Read the comment and decide whether it is related to your post or off topic. If it is off topic just ignore it and mark it as spam.

2. Check the email ID with what the comment is submitted, spammers usually wont spam with a real email ids. They use some confusing and meaningless email ID’s.

3. Check the websites they submitted, spam comments wont have a direct home page link but instead has some long links of internal pages to some webpages. Sometimes though the link is simple comment wont be related to your article. The websites usually end with .info or .ru extensions. So carefully examine the links submitted by the commenter. See the screenshot of some comments I received for my blog. We can clearly identify them as spam.

4. Not only bots but people also act as spammers, they link their site directly into the comment box and submit. So main motive of the person is to visit his page, such comments which misleads a visitor can be directly marked as spam.

5. Few people start to boast about your blog without mentioning your name, site name or even about the article underneath which they commented. Comments as such can also be safely ignored. You can see an example below.

What harm does spam comments do to your blog?

1. Spam comments will direct your visitors to some different webpages. You are actually loosing your traffic or simply increasing your bounce rate.

2. You might well lose your page rank as the link juice passes through those links which are different from your niche. Some times bad neighborhood too may be taken serious by search engines.

3. Genuine commentator’s wont love to comment or spend their valuable time in a blog which already contains a lot of spam comments. So you will lose people who actually came to give a genuine comment.

Do you spam?

1. Are you commenting on a site or a blog without proper knowledge of the article simply to promote your blog then you are a spammer.

2. Do you simply type your web address or blog address in the comment  box and submit then you are actually spamming.

3. You have promoted an affiliate link, just to get some income on the product then you really did posted a spam comment.

Conclusion

Now that you have seen few methods to identify spam and disadvantages of approving a spam comment just be at your best to eradicate spam and take your blog to a professional level. One more important recommendation is do use Akismet plugin as it makes your work as easy as possible. This plugin is free and it actually helps you in keeping your blog spam free.