Understanding Comment Spam in Blog? A Comprehensive Explanation

Is a comment Spam in a blog? This is one of the frequently asked questions that many readers ask. To increase readership and engage with visitors, commenting is one of the top practices that many bloggers use. That’s why every WordPress site, and even other CMS too have built-in sections for comments.

But along with this, it has also a negative aspect. If someone makes a comment spam and you approve this unknowingly, it will have a negative effect on your site’s ranking and SEO. So, identify whether the comment is spam or not which is made in your blog. Go through this article till the end, and you will learn about comment spamming. Nowadays, spam comment is increasing day by day, and unwanted persons use various means to make comment spam.

What Is Comment Spam in Blog and WordPress?

To put it in simple terms, Comment Spam is spam in the form of unsolicited text, messages, comments, or posts. People use spambots or automated spammers to post unwanted or irrelevant posts or comments to manipulate their commercial ends. As such spam comment is a black hat SEO that casts a negative impact on your site.

Any comment containing spam, too many keyword repetitions, or irrelevant links pointing to the comment maker’s site is considered comment spam. If you use too many keywords within a paragraph or section, then assume that these keywords or text are spam comments and you need immediate action to remove such a problem. You can use remove comment link plugin to remove site URL to discourage spam.

When did Spam Comment First Start?

Making spamming in comments is not a new thing to bloggers but it has been since around 2003. Users used to take advantage of these tactics by using Movable, a weblog tool. The company Six Apart, first of all, developed and released such a tool on 3rd Sept,2001. Its first version was 1.0 and the current version is 7.0

Why do the bad guys commit such unsolicited practices? They are the ones who want to rank their own site using a number of tactics and want to degrade your site in search rankings.

Once the spammers add irrelevant or unsolicited keywords or links to your site, your site provides trust to the former and that helps rank their site higher in Google or search engines.

JetPack says, “Spammers use various keywords in an attempt to improve their own search engine rankings, while ultimately hurting yours“.

Which Texts, Keywords, and Messages Are Comment spam?

I’ve already said that spammers use several ways to add comment spam on your site to rank their site better. Such spam blogging may be in the form of text, keywords, or irrelevant links.

When you use many repetitions of a keyword, it becomes spam.

Certain texts posted as comments may be spam if they are irrelevant to your content or site. Such comments contain texts that do not relate or add value to your content.

This is an example of spam comments which contain unwanted or solicited texts to increase its SEO ranking even though this text of comments does not relate to the targeted post.

Akismet caught these comments as spam because it is irrelevant to the content to which it was posted. Moreover, the comment maker added the same, targeted keywords multiple times in his comments. That’s why this is spam.

Key Note: If any comment appears in your blog and it contains texts irrelevant to your content then you can assume that it’s a type of spam comment. Had such comments been approved, they would have had negative impacts on your site.

As a blogger or a site owner, you should check your comment before you approve, delete, trash, or mark it as spam.

A comment, text, or message may be marked as spam even though it appears to be legit but the email box does not exist at all. If such a thing happens, the comment moderation system will mark it as spam.

Does Bot Generate Spam in Comments?

Whether a bot generates spam comments or not is a fact that you should learn. When you create a post or content and publish it, many a time, it’s found that the bots generate spam comments. Bot-generated comments are automatic, and such comments may come from the same IP addresses to which you assign, or map your site.

Look at the following text which contains bot-generated spam comments.

Comments that the bots generate on auto-pilot are dubbed spam comments that have neither a separate email box nor a particular IP Address pointing to a different destination, besides the same addresses to which your site is mapped.

Some spam bots are sophisticated and so advanced they can even scan your web pages, create accounts and post fake comments by spoofing.

Are There Spam Comments in Social Posts, besides Blogs?

Comment spam does not only involve blog posts but also appears in social posts. Sometimes cybercriminals deploy spammer bots to create fake accounts and post on deals, giveaways, offers, and porduct updates.

Spammers scan your account, steal data, and create similar fake accounts to spam real users.

Abusers post comment spam containing links to make their sites rank higher in the search results or make your site lose higher ranking in the search engine result pages(SERPs).