If you’ve been blogging for a while now and the “Big G” (er… Google) is indexing your posts, then you’re probably seeing some comment activity on one or more of your blog posts.  For a first-time beginning blogger, that can be a real rush–an acknowledgement that your hard work is paying off and that people are finally beginning to notice you!

Now, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but… (it’s never good when there’s a “but” in that kind of sentence) …the first thing to notice your hard work is usually a spam-bot.  A spam-bot is a tool that [bad] marketers use to post comments on other people’s blog posts, meant simply to gain them back-links to their sales pages.  It still astonishes me that spammers can afford such technology–a testament that spamming does actually work, though I don’t know how they sleep at night.  As the spam technology gets smarter and smarter, it gets harder to tell which comments are legit. and which are from the spam engines.

If your WordPress site is setup to prevent spam, it will require approval of comments so they don’t automatically get posted, and you may want to leverage plugins like WP-SpamFree and Akismet to filter out some.  But some will inevitably get through.  And you’ll be receiving emails from your WordPress site to moderate comments in no time.  Those emails look like this (emphasis provided):

A new comment on the post “SEO is an Ongoing Effort” is waiting for your approval

SEO is an Ongoing Effort

Author : Cheap Moncler Jackets Women (IP: 207.204.234.15 , 15.234.204.207.client.dyn.strong-sf28.reliablehosting.com)
E-mail : [email protected]
URL    : http://www.<removed>.org/shop-moncler-jackets/moncler-jackets-women
Whois  : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/207.204.234.15
Comment:
I’d like to switch backlinks with your site is this likely?

Approve it: https://strategicgains.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=approve&c=1191
Trash it: https://strategicgains.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=trash&c=1191
Spam it: https://strategicgains.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=spam&c=1191
Currently 174 comments are waiting for approval. Please visit the moderation panel:
https://strategicgains.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?comment_status=moderated

Blacklist the IP Address: https://strategicgains.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=wp-spamfree/wp-spamfree.php&wpsf_action=blacklist_ip&comment_ip=207.204.234.15

Since I have WP-SpamFree installed on my site, I also get the following in the email:

—————————————————-
:: Additional Technical Data Added by WP-SpamFree ::
—————————————————-

Page Referrer: \\\” refJS \\\”

Comment Processor Referrer: https://strategicgains.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3

IP Address               : 207.204.234.15
Remote Host              :
Reverse DNS              : 15.234.204.207.client.dyn.strong-sf28.reliablehosting.com
Reverse DNS IP           : 15.234.204.207.client.dyn.strong-sf28.reliablehosting.com
Reverse DNS Authenticity : [Possibly Forged]
Proxy Info               : No Proxy
Proxy Data               : 207.204.234.15
Proxy Status             : FALSE
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE     : *

HTTP_ACCEPT: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8

IP Address Lookup: http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/ipall/?ip=207.204.234.15

(This data is helpful if you need to submit a spam sample.)

Armed with this information, it’s somewhat easier to make a judgement call.  And to be sure, that’s all it is now days… a judgement call.  So here are my quickie points to determining whether the comment stays or gets marked as SPAM:

1. Author: if the author is not a person, I’m done.  As in the case above, the author is “Cheap Moncler Jackets Women” which is not a real person.  I don’t sell other people’s items from my blog unless I know what I’m selling–and then I’d make it a first class blog entry or guest post.  I’d delete this comment since it doesn’t use a real name.
2. Email: If the email doesn’t “look” legitimate, I delete the comment.  Spammers tend to use cryptic emails because they use so many addresses–using high numbers often times as part of the name.  My email addresses are straight forward and readable–most likely yours are too.  Most other people I know have emails that include their real name–the name should be in the Author section.  If the email address looks “off,” I delete the comment.  Also, spammers tend to use hotmail, yahoo, and gmail accounts so domains of hotmail.com, yahoo.com, gmail.com are automatically suspect.
3. URL: The link that people put here is very telling.  Sometimes it can be downright scary to click-through some of those!  And normally I don’t since I don’t have to get this far down the filter…  But check the link for relevancy and don’t give away your link juice to just anyone.  In this case, it’s obvious I’d be selling someone else’s jackets for women on a site that specializes in WordPress and selling information products–and a post that is about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Hardly relevant, so I’d simply delete this comment.
4. The Actual Comment: Often times I actually look at this first, since it’s so obvious–mostly just for entertainment value.  Most often this is the part that’s hardest to detect spam.  The spam-bots are best at this, since they can customize it with content from your site and make you think they’re really interested in your blog post.  This particular example is short and to the point–quite convincing!  Check these for a “generic” feel where the comment is often something like:  “Awesome post!  Really helped me out…” or “Your site looks amazing!  Who did your design work?” and so on.  Many of the comments can really appeal to your ego just so you’ll approve a comment even with the above items being completely obvious spam.  In this particular case, my email address and phone number are prominent on my site–it’s easy to get in touch with me–so blog comments are not the place to ask a question of this nature.  “SPAMMER!”

With the use of anti-spam plugins like, WP-SpamFree and/or Akismet, your WordPress website will automatically filter out many of the comments you get from spam-bots.  However, when some slip through, you now have the tools to make a judgement call on which comments are legitimate.

Happy blogging!