Is it SPAM?

One of my least favorite things about blogging is Comment Spam. It always distracts from well meaning comments and takes the time of the person running the site. Akismet does a GREAT job at helping to manage spam (and I’ve talked about it before) but I recently read a good article by Marie Leslie that talked about additional ways to tell if something is spam or not. Rather than rewrite her article I wanted to point out some of the things I often see missed on client sites.  As she mentioned, these comments “nearly always get picked up by Akismet, but sometimes you look at them and wonder if they could be legit. And sometimes they get missed.”

Comments that show up in an alphabet you don’t use on your blog can always be considered spam. I’ve yet to see any comment on my blog in Asian, Cyrillic or Arabic characters that wasn’t spam.

This one is so true. Someone isn’t going to read your post in your language, and then post a comment back in another. It just doesn’t make sense, so even if when translating the comment it makes sense, and even if it was a real comment, it doesn’t really add to your blog in that language anyway so don’t worry about letting it through.

Comments that are very generic and don’t seem to actually be related to the post are often spam. I’m not talking about things like, “Great post,” or “Good points, here.”

I often see things like “This is a great post. I was talking about blogging with my boyfriend the other day and I hope someday my blog will be as well written as yours.” and things like “Thanks, this post really made my day and I feel so much better about myself. I can’t wait do put into practice the things you talked about.”

Anyway, go read her article so you can see what you might be letting through that you probably don’t want to be. Comment spam can actually really hurt your SEO if you have a lot of shady sites using your comments as links so you do have to be careful. Go and check out “How to tell a spam comment from a real comment“.


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