This article is for those who have just started making a website and want to secure it from spam comments. There are billions of websites all over the world. Customers visit and interact with the website through comments. All comments made by the visitors are not good for your site. Comments that are genuine, and appreciate your contents bear a positive signal for your website. On the other hand, comments containing spam and suspicious links depreciate your site and even bring your website under Google penalty. You have to eliminate and throw away all kinds of suspicious comments but before it, you need to identify and scan as to whether a comment is either genuine or spam. That’s why We have come here to provide you with a free tutorial on ‘ How to get a free Akismet API Key for your site.
Page of Contents:
What Is Akismet?
Akismet is a spam filtering service plus plugin developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Akismet has its own global database integrated with a comment filtering service, to identify and block unwanted comments using its own features. It has about 5 million active installations all over the world. You can use its API key in order to allow it to work in your WordPress. The comments made by others are not allowed to reach the target sites until they pass through the filtering service. Here, Akismet runs its own algorithm over comments to identify as to which comment is genuine and which ones are fake. Once this algorithmic identification is over, the genuine comments are allowed to hit the target site while the fake ones are blocked.
What Is Akismet API?
Akismet API is a kind of Application Programming Interface that acts as a kind of intermediary software to execute certain functions. Here, the API collects and sends information to the filtering database, and the latter analyzes that data to yield output. Once this analyzation completed, the output is sent back to the target site again.
Why Akismet Needed?
You have made a website in self-hosted WordPress to start your online journey in digital space— good work. Thanks for your efforts! But do you know what may happen to your site when visitors interact with it? As your site goes live and grows, it gets more organic traffic from search engines and receives pingbacks along with trackbacks. All the comments made to your site are not genuine. Some comments may be generated by bots, some are real while the rest may contain spam. A site containing a lot of unwanted comments, suspicious links, and informal backlinks may get read by search engines. And, even if your site, too, encounters such kind of happenings, it may cast adverse effects upon it. Once your site is penalized, it is very hard to recover it from a penalty, as it takes a long course of time and effort. You have to apply SEO again to revamp your site.
But as you have launched your site, it has started to drive organic traffic to it—-will you not interact with visitors? I say, of course, you should allow visitors to interact with your audience to make them more engaged in your work. Because it will be not good if you like to work alone? To become successful in the field of your business, you need to build and grow an audience network around your industry. If you overlook this, you can’t be successful.
But there is a negative side to it on the back of the same coin. Do you know what it is? These are unwanted comments containing spam, junk email, link manipulation, etc. This is a place where you need a tool to fight all kinds of spam. That’s why you need Akismet. It has its own part and parcel to identify and analyze data. As soon as comments are made to reach a target site, it catches it, and runs its own algorithm over it to distinguish the genuine from the bad ones. The unwanted comments are blocked while the good ones are allowed to pass to reach the target site.
How to Get a free Akismet API Key for Your New Site?
Now, we are going to discuss ‘How to get a free Akismet API key so as to use it on your website. It is quite easy. To use Akismet, you need to have a wordpress.com account. If you have an account on it, you can use that to sign in in order to get an API Key for your site. On the other hand, if you do have not an account in it, you can create a new one. No matter to worry. To create an account, follow the following steps:
- Go to Plugins>>Add from within your wp-admin bar in your WordPress.
- Write Akismet and click on the search button.
- The plugin appears there. Click on install. The plugin will be installed meanwhile.
- Click ‘Activate’
- In the next step, you will be asked to sign in. You cannot sign in if you do have not an account on wordpress.com. If you have not created any account with wordpress.com, then create a new one.
- Once the sign up completed, you receive an email confirmation. On the other hand, if you have an account, then just sign in to your account.
- You will be redirected to its plan and pricing page.
Based on your need, you can choose any one of these three plans. You can get a free Akismet API Key only for your personal site. If you choose it, then click on Get Personal. It will redirect you to the next page where you have to fill out a form containing billing information, your site URL, and other terms and conditions. Check each field, enter your site URL, draw the slider to zero and click on ‘Continue with Personal Subscription’.
Once the plan subscription completed, you will be taken to a new page to provide you with a new Akismet API Key for your site. But you need to sign in to your Akismet account via the wordpress.com login link provided above on the same page to see this API Key.
Also, you will be sent an email containing your API Key of Akismet. Now, login to your Akismet account, copy the API Key and come back to your WordPress site’s Akismet dashboard. Here, now you have to connect your site with the Akismet API Key. To connect this key go through the following steps:
- On the Akismet dashboard on your WordPress, click Manually enter an API Key.
- Paste the copied API Key in the field labeled ‘Enter your API key’ that you can see now on the left side in the screenshot below.
- Now, click on the field labeled’ Connect with API key.’
Once the connection is set up, Akismet starts working for your site. It automatically prevents comments with spam and lets the genuine ones hit the target site.
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