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Meet the author:
Jill Olkoski

Jill has a MA in Clinical Psychology, a BS in Computer Science, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering.

She currently owns Aldebaran Web Design in Edmonds (near Seattle WA) and enjoys educating her clients on topics related to small business website design.

In Jill's previous life, she spent 17 years in the engineering and quality organizations of a Fortune 100 tech company.

 


How To Tell If A Comment is Real or Spam In Your WordPress Blog

November 15th, 2010

Here’s a good example of what WordPress spam looks like, disguised as a comment.

Clues to detecting spam:

1. The comment “when I was quite younger, i alway enjoy online chatting with friends and relatives” makes no sense on a “How To Contact DreamHost.com For Support”.

2. The author is not a person’s name, but a keyword, in this case “Electric Oven”.

3. The email address doesn’t match the URL’s domain.

4. The URL is obviously trying to get a link.

What was the objective? For SEO, you want links that have their anchor text (what you click on) to be a keyword. So in this example, they wanted the words “Electric Oven” to be the anchor text and wanted it to go to their electric oven website. In WordPress, the person’s name is the anchor text for the person’s URL – so they were trying to take advantage of this configuration.

Of course, I foiled them and clicked “Spam It” which tells Akismet, my spam plugin to report this as spam which then labels this person/ip address as a spammer, and will put similar message right into the spam bucket of other WordPress bloggers.

Jill
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J. Olkoski
Aldebaran Web Design, Seattle
Jill Olkoski has a BS in Engineering, a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Clinical Psychology. She delights in using her advanced technical and psychological skills to help small business owners develop cost-effective and successful websites.



4 Responses to “How To Tell If A Comment is Real or Spam In Your WordPress Blog”

  1. Paul Says:

    Useful article Jill.

    Spam is the bane of most bloggers. I may be new to WordPress but same thing happens on Blogger. Biggest clue, no one called Electric Oven and the comments are usually English, but not as we know it. I have to watch the English because I get a lot of readers for whom English is 2nd or 3rd language, they may know the words but sometimes does not quite make sense.

    Akismet is really good, I just delete most of the ones it flags as spam.

  2. Jill Olkoski Says:

    Akismet is absolutely fabulous – I couldn’t run a blog without it, I agree. Welcome to WordPress 🙂

  3. Dottie Schwalbe Says:

    i thought this was a great great write-up. My business is really looking forward to another post.

  4. Eli Says:

    Good tips. All very true. Thanks for the post. (this is a real comment…lol)



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