Many people who start out blogging don’t realize how much spamming takes place on the comments area. Getting comments, in general, is a good thing.  In fact, you can never get enough comments, in my opinion.

However, when you start to get comments on your blog, you quickly learn that many of your early comments are spam, sometimes making up all or almost all of your comments. You see, spammers are actually more motivated to comment than a typical user. Why? They are advertising for free using your space and also creating backlinks to their site.

Spam can often look friendly even if it doesn't care about you.

Let me be clear, commenting on other blogs is a good thing. You want to discuss the topic and then give your blog a plug. That’s smart and encouraged by all. You are providing value to the other blog, which is basically what all bloggers want.

Spamming, on the other hand, typically does not provide any value to the site. They often have a generic message like “great tips” or “I like your blog” followed by some links. Sometimes they even skip the formalities and jump straight to a bunch of links to stop smoking sites when your blog is about parenting. You are being used and abused! Blog spamming artificially increases their site’s rankings and makes your site look bad in the process. Although search engines have put in some measures to that recognize spam and decrease the importance of these auto-backlinks, it will never overcome the persistence of spammers — especially if the spam is actually related to the blog. For example, I get spam comments for making money all the time, which isn’t totally off-topic from what I write about. Many of my readers are bloggers and a majority of those want to earn a little income in the process.

For freebloghelp.com, I can tell you that about 60% of the comments are spam, which seems high. However, this blog discusses a popular topics such as blogging, making money online, hosting, SEO, etc. There are lots of spammers when it comes to this niche. Some of the spam is actually not terrible since their comments actually seem relevant, just a little bit but still relevant. I try to give my comment posters the benefit of the doubt even if the comment only seems be a hair high on the value scale. But out of the aforementioned 60% of spam here, I still only allow about 10% of those to stay. You never see the other 90% since I purge them before they even show up on my blog.

The good news is (really, there is good news when it comes to people spamming your blog) that spam comments tell you that your blog is alive. Your blog is making a name for itself and people can find it. In fact, the bigger your blog gets, the more spam you’ll have. I mean think about it, who wants to spam a blog with no visitors?

So what can a blogger do? Well, you have do some manual intervention but there is help. There are tools that can handle most of the dirty work for you. All you have to do monitor a bit, essentially clicking a few buttons to administer the comments once a day. My next post will discuss the free tool that I use to manage my blog spam.

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