Hello,
I'm Mervi Eskelinen!
An artist, nerd and sorcerer, dedicated to make world softer and better for everyone, and to get you to make more art. Make art, change the world!
Spam comments will drive your traffic away
In time to time I stumble upon a blog with good content and plenty of comments. As I go and check the comments I soon notice most of them are pure spam. At that point I dash the blog without leaving a comment. Obviously the blog isn't worth it.
You might think more comments is better. People coming to your blog look at the number of comment and think: "This is popular! This must be great!" They won't.
It's okay if a non-valid comment here and there sneaks in, but it must vanish after a few moments. Spam causes you a technical problem too, but first and foremost it's bad for your image. It makes YOU look bad.
How spam will hurt your reputation?
First of all it shows you are lazy. You don't have any interest in checking (and cleaning) your comments section. Therefore you won't have any interest in a valid comment either.
Leaving a comment in between all the spam isn't good for the commenters reputation either. Because all these other comments are spam, then must be this one as well. Besides commenting the spam infested blog is like making out with a guy who obviously hasn't taken a shower in weeks: You never know what you'll catch. (Believe me when I say this was the family version of the analogy.)
Of course the spam in your comments section can also give an impression you have no clue on what is spam and what's not. There's a chance you are so clueless you don't understand all those comments are spam or you don't know what to do with them. Doesn't look good for you.
Why spam will present a technical issue?
Spam attracts more spam. When the spam bots notice your blog is open for their business, they will come, see and conquer it. All that spam nutty amount of spam will eat the bandwidth, nevermind blocking your comments sections.
This will cause your blog to be slow to load. As website browsers tend to have short attention span, they will leave after a short while. Also it might go as far as bringing your site down. That's going to be a problem, don't you think?
What can you do?
Start with deleting all the spam comments. If you are unsure which comments are spam and which aren't, find someone who can tell you that. (Yes I can!)
Then hook your blog up with some sort of automized spam fighting methods. I use Typepad AntiSpam, which is free and very good. Blogger blogs come with some sort of spam prevention and WordPress.com based blogs are married with Akismet.
Relying solely on automation won't cut it. You will have to keep checking the comments for spam, since all the automated methods will fail at some point. Often spam prevention has to be "taught" to recognize the spam. In times they will let spam through and in times they will mark valid comments as spam. It's loads of work.
If you aren't up for all that work you will need to hire someone to moderate your blog comments or disable them altogether. You don't want the spammers to take over your blog, it will only hurt you.
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