It’s an going battle in blog land. On one hand, having people leave comments on your blog is a great way to show that people read your work and appreciate what you have to say. Good comments can show other readers that you are an authority to be trusted. Negative comments can give you topics to address in future posts. But either way comments are a great way to engage readers and keep them interested in your blog.
On the other hand, comments are being used and abused by spammers who want nothing more than to get links to their blog on your blog. Now some of these spam message are obvious spam. They know you’ll catch them if you even glance at your comments. These spam posts are often nothing more than lists of links to other sites. Lists that don’t even try to fit the category you write about. But other spammers have become trickier. Some just go with a fairly generic post telling you that they like the blog or agree with the topic. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that they never actually mention what they like about a blog or topic. But they hope you’ll leave the nice comment up so that people can follow the link to their site.
Other spammers have taken the tactic of pretending to argue or disagree with the post in order to engage the blog writer. They’ll post a comment that says something like “I think you’re wrong” and hope that not only will you leave the comment, you’ll actually argue back to prove your point, thereby giving their post more attention.
So what can you do to fight blog comment spam? I’ll give you some suggestions in my next blog post.