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.

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill