How To Spot + Deal With Spam Comments

Hello, I’m Madeleine! Today I will be talking all about spam.

No, not that spam. Today I’ll be talking about spam comments. Spam comments are comments that are “irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients” (Oxford Languages). They also often promote their own products, or on our case, blogs.

Before I get into how to spot spam comments, I’m going to list some dos and don’ts when dealing with spam comments.

Don’t click on any links in the spam comments.

These links may give your computer viruses, have inappropriate content, or pretend that your computer has viruses so that they can give your computer an actual virus. If you look through your spam comments, they often use URL shorteners (like bit.ly) to hide suspicious links.

Sometimes if you click on a link the website it leads to looks real, but the second or third time you visit the website it’ll do weird stuff.

Look through your spam comment folder often.

WordPress isn’t perfect at spotting spam comments, so kind comments may end up in the spam comment folder. However, be careful to not approve spam comments.

Block people that leave spam comments.

Before deleting your spam comments, make sure to block the people that left them. To do this, click on User Info and then Block User. This will prevent them from giving you anymore annoying spam.

Some spam comments may not land in the folder, while other comments end up in the folder, so it’s up to you to discern them. So here are a few pointers to determine whether comments are spam or not!

They’re very vague.

If the comment is very vague, like, “Lovely content. Check out my blog at example.com.” Spam has to be distributed to many blogs easily, so they are often going to be very vague. From personal experience, spam comments often include the word “content.”

They have a lot of links.

Spam comments aren’t just there to annoy you, they are trying to get your money or personal info, so they often have links. Like I said before, don’t click on these.

They have bad grammar.

This is kinda a weird one but spam comments often have bad grammar. I found in this article that they have bad grammar to bypass spam comment filters.

The comment “writer” has a weird email.

You can see the email address of the comment writer by clicking on User Info. If the email is something like “johnsmith@pears.red” instead of something like “johnsmith@gmail.com,” the comment might be spam.

You get the comment multiple times from different “writers.”

I’ve got multiple of the same comments and sometimes slightly different but basically the same comments, or promoting the same product/website.

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I hope you found this post helpful! Let me know what the funniest spam comment you’ve ever gotten was. Three times I got a ten page paragraph essay in a spam comment. That was interesting to read 😂 If you have any tips on spam comments, leave them in the comments too! Bye!

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