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Speed up your WordPress website with spam comment cleansing

If you’re a WordPress website owner, it’s likely you’ve received annoying spam comments at least once. In fact, it is not uncommon for some sites to receive hundreds or even thousands of comments every week.

As a website owner, it’s great to see a growth in incoming traffic, but the downside is that when your site begins to gain traction, the amount of spam comments it receives also increases. Most of the spam comments come from automated spam bots and if you don’t moderate them you’ll find it can reduce your SEO score and significantly slow down your site.

How do spam bots find my website?

As WordPress is used by millions of people, it means that millions of websites have similar HTML output for comment forms. This makes it easier for bots to find open comment forms on blog posts and post spam comments.

To find targets, a spammer crawls the internet for relevant keyword searches that are regularly found on WordPress sites e.g. “powered by wordpress” or “leave a reply“. In this case most results will be for pages with open comment forms on WordPress sites.

What’s the purpose of spam commenting?

Comment spam exists for one reason, and one reason only: the link.

The business model spam comments is to get people to click on their link. It’s purely a numbers game in the sense that the more blogs they post on, the more likely they are to get a click. A good comment spammer will send millions of spam comments to try and gain clicks and they’re hoping your blog may be a prime opportunity.

Does it matter if I allow spam commenting on my blog?

If you don’t moderate comments (i.e. you allow all comments to be directly published without an approval) then you’ll soon find your posts and pages filled with irrelevant content. This will ultimately reduce your SEO score as search engines will be unsure what your website is about and assume your blog is spammy. After all, you are the company you keep.

You’ll also run the risk of being seen as an easy target leading to even more spam. Plus, it can annoy your real customers and followers if you give spammers equal presence in your comment section.

How can I avoid spam comments?

The best way to stop comment spam is to configure your settings so that you have to manually approve each comment. Comments can also be marked as spam automatically if they contain any banned words you specify in your blacklist.

Moderating comments can be time consuming but it will prevent your site’s SEO from being negatively impacted.

What happens if I don’t delete the comments?

You may be tempted to leave a backlog of unapproved comments due to the time and effort it takes to look through and approve them; however, this can greatly reduce the size of your WordPress database if it has a lot of spam comments.

If your WordPress database keeps getting filled with spam comments that are not actioned, it weighs down your database making your website sluggish. To avoid slowing down your page loading times it’s vital to keep on top of the comments being accumulated in the backend.

At WP Tech Support, we offer a spam comment cleansing service as part of our ongoing WordPress maintenance and support packages. We delete any spam comments on your WordPress blog, prevent future spam being posted and continuously monitor the comments you receive. This leaves you to focus the day-to-day running of your business without being bogged down with administration. Take a look at our great value plans to find the one best suited to your business.

Comments

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