Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Comment Spam

Comment Spam

The folks at blogging software company Movable Type have released their “Six Apart Guide for Fighting Comment Spam.” Comment spam is a problem that plagues all bloggers, and which generally becomes more of a problem the more readers and popularity the blog garners. (I don’t have a problem with comment spam here. But I hope to!)

I think of comment spam as akin to graffiti—crude messages scrawled on the walls of your pristine commentary. Most of the spam I get on this blog and my personal blog has to do with mortgage opportunities, gambling and phamaceuticals, and a spammer commonly hits several different posts on the blog at once. I once checked my morning email to find a spammer had put a spam comment on every entry of the blog.

Since nobody actually wants or needs to read these messages, it’s important to get rid of them, but it can be time-consuming to go through every comment. This guide from MT presents several strategies for preventing spam in the first place, and then dealing with it once you’ve got it. Though some information is specific to the MT blogging platforms, every blogger can benefit from the thorough explanation of how comment spam happens and many of the suggested solutions apply across the board. A few strategies discussed: