The Megaphone Hosting

We get a lot of questions here about stopping spam on blogs. The answer is there is no single solution. Today spammers use bots to troll the internet, just like the good ones you want on your site. A couple of example of good bots are Google and Yahoo.

These type of bots visit your site several times a day and if you have your blog set up to “ping” on each post then usually they will be on your site within minutes of you adding any new content. This allows your site’s content to get indexed in these companies’ search engines where others can find you. This of course is what you want.

The bad bots also visit your site often. They will try to harvest any emails they can find and send spam to any email address you have for contact info on your site.

They are a pain to deal with no doubt and there is no way to get 100% success without also barring some of the good bots from your site. There are some things you can do:

1. If your blog has Askimet available, make sure to enable this plugin. If you’re currently hosting with The Megaphone Network then you are using the latest version of WordPress and Askimet is already installed on your blog. Simply enable the plugin if you have not already. This plugin will block all guest comments suspected of being spam. It will notify you by email that you have a message that might be spam. You can always decide to allow the comment if in fact it is not spam.

2. You should have your posting settings set for either “members only and one approved post” or “admin must approve all posts”. The members only and one previously approved post works wonders if you do wish to allow for comments.

3. Try to not place any email address inside your content. Use the “contact us” links on the tool bar or sidebars.

While there is no way to stop all the spam you will get on your blog, using the above tips will help.