How to Identify False Positive Spam Comments

Even if you use Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam Plugin for WordPress, there can be a small amount of spam comments that bypass the WP plugins. Those very good Antispam plugins block more than 95% of bad junk messages. But what can be done with the rest?

In general, comment spammers write messages to escape your attention. Although they use smart spam bots and BlackHat software like XRumer or ScrapeBox, they want you to believe they are real bloggers, real people, writing real comments. They want you yo approve the comment and publish it on your site. They simply lie in order to convince you to give them the benefit of the doubt.

These Web spammers want to advertise on your blog for free and they’re not even asking your permission first. Right now someone is offering to sell links from your blog to anyone willing to pay a few dollars (or a few cents). If your blog is well known, it may even be listed by name, with backlinks for sale at a set price.

Web spammers are selling links from your blog to their clients. They do this to game the search engines and trick your readers into visiting dubious web sites. Their clients are sometimes seemingly harmless, but are often peddling fake pills, adult, scams and malware.

Identify False Positive Spam Comments you can first check for links to spammy URLs in the comment url box. Sometimes I’ll see a thoughtful comment clearly written in direct response to the post it’s commenting on, under a real person’s name, and still mark it as spam because they link to a site whose legitimacy is questionable. Another great method I use and that never ever fails is lookup the exact comment or one of it’s sentences in google. Let’s take this sample spam comment:

and paste it exactly in google. Make sure you write it between Quotes (“sample comment”) which tells Google to look for the query in that exact order. If you get many results on the exact comment, it’s most likely comment spam. Now check this:

We received more than 330,000 results. We are talking about 330,000 clones of the same spam comment posted in blogs.

Another consideration is that old posts tend to attract a lot of spam. Real people generally recognize that if a post is a year or so old, the conversation there is pretty much over. Spambots do not realize that. It still sometimes happens that someone comments on an ancient post, but the age of the post is a big red flag.

If you can Identify False Positive Spam Comments, then you can mark them as spam and they will not comment again.

2 Comments

  1. Thanks for this very useful article. I’ll be here again.

  2. Great article. Thanks.

    Sent via samsung mobile.

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