Comment spam is a constant pain and chore for anyone running a blog. The prospect of gaining links to their websites means that a mix of human and automated spam producers will keep submitting their comments packed with terrible content.
Spam filters (such as WordPress’s Akismet), Captchas and other tools can make life a lot easier. Or you can turn off comments either completely, or on posts older than a certain age, to keep everything to a manageable level.
But if you’re feeling bad, rest assured even the biggest company on the internet can make mistakes:
The official Google Inside Adsense blog is packed full of useful information for publishers displaying the Adsense advertising platform. As an Adsense-powered publisher, I’m one of them.
It’s also a well-ranked and linked-to site, for obvious reasons. Which explains why any article in the archive is absolutely packed with spam comments. Just go back a few months (I started 12 months ago and went further back), and scroll through the 50+ comments on most posts. After the first few legitimate comments posted when the article went live, the rest will be spam comments posted far more recently, which means they’re obviously automatically published without any checks.
I checked out a couple of other official Google blogs (Did you know there’s a handy Google Blog Directory?), and most of the others are fine, having disabled comments after a set period of time.
Proof that even when you employ the likes of Matt Cutts, there can still be a slightly embarrassing oversight somewhere in the network!
Love the comment spam to this post…
Good point. Somehow it skipped the spam filter, but should all be gone now!
Dan, your article is exactly what I was looking. I’m preparing to launch my little blog in May, and I am concerned about how spam may threaten my ability to maintain a website that Google would be happy to continue serving ads to. I just installed the DISQUS and Akismet plugins and need to play with them more. At the moment it appears anyone can say anything they want in a comment. I’m not sure how this spam filter works – but I hope it works. Otherwise, I will have to personally moderate all comments I guess.
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your comment, and hope it helps to know that spam is something that can affect anyone, so there is a bit of leeway when it comes to comments.
Personally, I find Akismet is really very good at filtering spam – it does take some manual intervention on occasion, but over time it does a pretty good job of capturing most spam comments (And I run some sites which get 100s of spam comments every day).
Besides Akismet, the other thing that can really help will be setting a time limit for comments on posts, for instance, 3 months, as generally you don’t get many comments on older posts (Obviously you’ve provided an exception to that rule!). Generally I leave comments open on a site like this where I can manually catch most things (But the occasional one does slip through on older posts), but would time limit comments on a much more popular site.
Please do let me know when your site launches – I’d be keen to see it and happy to make suggestions based on running various blogs and sites for the last 6+ years…
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