I’m so sick of spam and comment spam. I should be … I’ve been dealing with it for close to 20 years!

I was an early internet or shall I say World Wide Web user (1991 – remember BBS) and I started my first website in 1995. That’s a long time to have been dealing with spammy emails and now that I blog (my husband and I have 19 blogs between us) I have comment spam to deal with as well.

I’m so tired of getting emails and comments on my sites that are full of keywords and multiple links. You know … if the comment or keyword had anything to do with my article or post I might let it get by and I do occasionally … but most of them have nothing to do with the topic of my post.

I’ll write about my dog and get people leaving keywords and links for scammy products that will make you rich on the internet. I write about my dog and I get weight loss and lipofuze reviews links. I write about my garden and get spam comments filled with real estate or finance links and keywords.

Arghhhhh!

We changed all of our blogs over to DoFollow three years ago and since that time the spam comments have quadrupled!

So how do I deal with it? I moderate comments on our blogs heavily. If a comment is clearly spam, doesn’t make sense, has nothing to do with the topic of the post or simply says “nice post” or a new one – I’m having trouble viewing your sight with such and such browser It goes directly to the Akismet spam pile.

If a comment is somewhat on topic but full of keywords I’ll edit the comment to remove extra links (or nofollow the ones that are kind of relevant to my topic).

If someone is clearly spamming … such as hitting several of my blogs within an hour or two I might leave their comments if they are on topic but I delete their name link and any extra links. People that hit a good chunk or all of our blogs within a few hours are clearly going through a DoFollow list.

I mean, our blogs cover a variety of topics – two are humor blogs, two are guitar and music related, one is about my garden, another about organic gardening, one is about web design while another is about blogging and tech gadgets and two are personal, another is about celebrity news etc … most people aren’t interested in all of those topics on the same day let alone within an hour or two! LOL

As for email spam … well I used to get over 1000 emails a day thanks to all of our websites (plus mailing lists that i run that are associated with three sites) and the spam that they seemed to generate (as well as genuine email requests). Now I run our main email accounts through Gmail and forward the mail back to our email accounts and Google filters out most of the spam.

How do you deal with comment spam on your blog or website? Do you moderate? What’s your policy?

I know that my way of dealing with comment spam is likely a lot harsher than others, but with all of our websites and blogs we get anywhere from 50 to hundreds of comments each day … For me, the way I’ve described how we deal with comment spam above, is the best way, but it may not be the best way for you and your site.