Spam Comments are becoming a major issue now a days because more and more people are leaning towards spamming to get backlinks. Heck people are even paying spammers to spam with their url. Well are you tired of these spammers? I know I am. Over the past year, I dealt with tons of spam troubles because it seemed that a few spam comments would bypass the security anyways. So I thought I should compile a list of wordpress plugins, and tricks that I have learnt over the past to fight against spam comments in wordpress.

Wordpress Tools to Fight Spam

1. Akismet

This is the dual sword that everyone should have in their possession. Each wordpress copy comes with this plugin by default. All what you have to do is get an API key from wordpress.com. Once you get the API, you are equipped with this weapon. Akismet really gets the job done. It catches over 350+ Spam / day on average for Balkhis. Without it, I don’t think I would be able to monitor the comments.

2. Defensio

Defensio is like an automated bow and arrow that is bound to hit the bull’s eye everytime in your fight against spam. Defensio have your comment traffic route through it’s system where it analyzes each comment for the level of spam, and assigns a grade. If the grade is of an adequate value then the comment is published, if the comment seems suspicious it will be held for your review. Defensio provides you with good stats and gives you RSS Feed for both good and spam comments.

3. Simple Captcha

Simple captcha does exactly what it sounds like. It adds a random image in your comment box which every user is required to enter. It fools the spammers. This is one of the most efficient ways to prevent spam, but this makes all of your users enter the captcha as well which might reduce your total comments on the site as well because most users get annoyed with the captcha system.

4. Simple Trackback Validation

Simple Trackback Validation filters through your trackbacks and only show you the ones that are not spam. Not a long while ago, this technique started to get alot of buzz and it is now being used by alot of spammers. They make you think like they are linking to your post, but mostly either they are copying your entire post, or have a short link to your post in a porn page or something spammy like that.

5. Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior analyzes the HTTP headers, IP address, and other metadata regarding the request to determine if the comments are spammy or not. This is also very effective if you have Akismet installed. This is probably one of the better combos. Not to mention, this works on almost all php-based sites like drupal, and anything else.

6. Spam Karma

Spam Karma assigns a score to each comment using a specific rating system which includes the age of the post, email, their link and more. The developer has stopped developing this plugin and will not provide future support, so don’t expect any updates. Although I was told that this plugin works well.

7. WP Spam Hitman

This plugin lets you set a list of words that are in spam comments. But you must remember that these words are often used by your normal visitors also, so you can’t just blacklist these words. WP Hitman takes these words and analyze how many times they have been used, and if they have been used alot then it triggers it as spam. This might put your users comment in danger also, but sometimes to avoid spam, you have to this method for a shortwhile.

Wordpress Tips to Fight Spam

Ok I have tried just about all of the below tricks that I am about to tell you, so you can use it. I will tell you the pros and cons of each, so you can make the judgement by yourself.

8. Comment Moderation and Blacklist

Moderating comments is a default function with wordpress. You can find it if you go in your admin panel if you click Settings tab and then discussion. I suggest you leave the url level to default. Use this feature only, if you find a certain person suspicious, you can put their IP in this list otherwise don’t add anything because you will be increasing the work load on yourself.

Blacklist option is right below the moderation area in Settings ~ Discussion. In this if you put down any email, IPs, or domains it would be blacklisted. You can blacklist a certain email, IP Address, or domain. The sad part is that they always find a way around. By adding more and more into this list you will hurt your loyal readers because their comment will go in Spam as well. I had this happen with me. So I try to avoid making the list bigger. Use with caution.

9. Nofollow Comments

Spammers target blogs that are dofollow. It was a big thing a while back. People would comment on every do follow blog, so bloggers would make their blog do follow in the hope of increasing the comments. Well, you will increase the amount of comments. But half of them would be spam. So the choice is yours. Most popular sites use nofollow. The reason for that is because it really doesn’t matter. Your comments get indexed anyways in the search engine and it counts as a backlink. You just don’t get the PR Juice (or some says).

Well here is how you can add a no follow to your comments.

Open this file: /wp-includes/comment-template.php

Look for the word External, and just add a no follow tag after it.

Some people might say that you are not being fair to your loyal users because you are no following their comments. That is why there is a top commentators widget which you can use to reward your top commentators by giving them a follow link from your site

I am sure most of you guys are already familiar with these tactics hopefully I added some more news. This is for starters or those who are still looking for more options. Believe me guys you get Akismet and add any one of these extra layers. You should be set.

It’s easy to notice the trend with bloggers these days. Let me tell you how things start. First a blogger starts a new blog. Then he would put up some nice content with it, dress the blog with a cute design, hire someone to customize the logo and so on. Then the blogger would start promoting. Forum interaction, blog commenting, guest posting and many more. After some months, the blog now averages over 100 uniques a day, with 10+ comments per post and some 50+ feed readers. Then the next more months, it doubles. So what’s the wrong there? Well there’s no wrong except for the fact that after it, the blogger thinks his blog is already popular. By saying popular, it’s like he can put up couple of posts a week, take a coffee, sleep, then still get a heap of traffic, subscribers and responses.

That is probably one of the bigger misconception in blogging. Of course when starting out, you really have to put ton of effort to get noticed. Yaro Starak calls it “sweat work” wherein you have to go to as many places as you can just to stamp your site or blog. While you don’t need to exert that same sweat when your blog starts to become popular, it doesn’t mean you have to stop working. Today I summarize some of the things that you should probably think about, before you choose to make the same mistake.

It’s Easy to Lose Readers

Let’s face this fact, bloggers comment so they can get notice and hopefully someone could get back commenting on them as well. With over hundred thousands of blogs in this niche (blogging, internet marketing), it wouldn’t take long for someone to forget you easily. I’m not saying that you should always comment to those who comment to you but you see, blogging is all about interaction. They say it’s easy to lose readers when you write something crappy. I say its easier to lose one when you don’t care about getting your content into them.

It’s EASY to SLIDE down

Well I always thought blogs are like offline property. The value decreases so fast if not properly utilized. Every blogs are always associated with other online stuffs such as Alexa, Technorati, Pagerank and so. I’m not saying those are super duper important stuffs. What I want to say is that things change so fast and we could say that sliding down is easier than going up. Losing money could be easier than earning as well. Think, every blogger is working so hard (and smart) just to get themselves and their blogs up. I don’t care what your blog is (and how famous it is) but I’m pretty sure that it could easily slide down if you are so quick to start thinking it’s famous.

EASY to lose advertisers

I mentioned it in my blog in my post about failures. When my blog started receiving 20+ comments and traffic stats were really so high, I thought I don’t need to maintain it any longer. It’s silly but I thought my blog was already like ones I’ve been seeing on top 10 make money online blogs. It happened so quick, the advertisers immediately unsubscribed to me and I just lost 3/4 of them the next month. What most bloggers don’t realize is that advertisers always check things. They review what sites are giving them a bad ROI, what sites are giving them poor click-through rates and etc. It’s more than just purchasing an ad space, and getting their banner up to your site.

It’s NOT easy working your way up again

I’m not sure if you would agree with me about this. In my experience, its not easy to gain something that you lost before back. I was notorious for spammy posts in forums before (long time ago) and so I had a bad rep around it. People there have always thought I was not genuine, even though I was starting to become sincere. It works the same way with blogs. Some of my daily read blogs before who started turning their site into an affiliate promotion blogs have lost me as their reader. I’m sure people have their own list of blogs-to-read. If you know your blog is in their list, then make sure your blog would be there forever.

I know some of you may not agree with those things I listed there that’s why feel free to give your feedback. I know it’s somehow ridiculous to exert so much effort on just a blog, after all it’s just a blog. But I’m pretty sure you always cared about your blog and how it can be improved, hence why you are reading Balkhis blog. Just be sure not to overthink about your blog’s accomplishment in the earlier period of your blog.

This article was a guest post by Melvin. Melvin is an 18 year old entrepreneur who blogs at MelvinBlog.com. He specializes in affiliate marketing, SEO and blogging where he aims to share his experience with people on his blog. Feel free to subscribe to his feed.

Bloggers are you being distracted by some tasks which might be essential for your blog? Well I have always been a firm believer of priorities. You need to know your priority! For a blogger, the number one priority is write quality blog posts. Everything else comes afterwards. Now just blogging never got anyone anywhere. So in this posts, I will talk about some tasks that we all need to do, but watch ourselves because some of these can get addicting and then distract us from our blogging.

Social Media Networking

YES, it is important. But sometimes bloggers get distracted in updating their twitter, plurk, or something else like that. Maybe they are too busy interacting with their friends on facebook, or creating profiles at other networks. While they are all necessary, always know your priority and for bloggers it is blogging. Another common one is bookmarking. Bloggers are too busy becoming a power digger or a high profile social media celebrity on stumbleupon. Do that, but don’t let it distract you.

Design and SEO

For people who are extremely crazy about designs like me, this is a huge distraction. You worry too much about your blog design. You spend hours upon hours developing a new design, and then more hours on coding this new template, but is it necessary. You can spend this time searching for good resources to write an awesome post. Learn how to stick with one design which is good. Same thing goes with SEO. Yes Search Engine Ranking is important, but do I try to optimize my site daily? NO! Write a good meta tag and description. Work on your titles rather than checking your rankings and so on.

Interacting with Readers and Fellow Bloggers

It is very important to reply to all your readers emails and interact with them in the comment box. Same goes with your fellow bloggers. It is essential that you make good relationship with them. But since there are thousands of blogs out there, it becomes an endless task. Learn how to allocate your time and focus on writing good blog posts first.

Monetizing and Analyzing Stats

Alright now this is where it becomes trouble. This step is extremely important if you are running some affiliate marketing campaign on your blog and you are using adwords because you better be checking stats otherwise you might lose some money, but don’t let it distract you. Same goes on with checking your subscribers daily or updaing your traffic stats every 2 hours. It is essential to check your traffic, and see how and where are you getting the traffic from, but this can often become very distracting, and it effects your writing.

Being Emotional/Upset

I have learn’t this the hard way but being emotional and upset with others don’t really work on the blog because it kills your blog’s life. So it is pointless to get into argument with other bloggers. Might be some linkbait, but not all link baits work. It also drive your readers away. Another time when bloggers really get upset is when their content is being copied. Stop worrying about it because you can’t stop these guys. How many sites are you going to send a DMCA notice. You will get one shut down, and ten others will pop up. It waste your time, and time is money for us.

I am not saying that these tasks you shouldn’t do, but I am saying is that allocate your time. Blogging for every blogger should come first, and everything should come second in business. Learn how to prioritize your actions. Set goals for the day, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish each day. Keep track of time for everything that you do because that will make you more aware of what you are doing, and you can knock yourself in the head if you waste time.

I have been a security freak for all of my websites. A few of my websites have been hacked in the past, and I hate the period. I have written in the past a post about how to protect your blog from hackers. Today I will talk about another key thing that Wordpress have which makes it a lot more secure than people think.

A client recently told me that Wordpress is an open source software hence not secure. Obviously understandable from someone who does not know anything about wordpress. Yes a lot of open source softwares have some security issues, but wordpress is getting stronger and stronger after each release.

In the release of wordpress 2.6 and onward they have included this feature of secret keys. Which adds an extra layer of security to your blog and make it more secure. In order to do this you would have to open your: wp-config.php file, and right after the other define tags add the following:

define(‘AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(‘SECURE_AUTH_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(‘LOGGED_IN_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);
define(‘NONCE_KEY’, ‘put your unique phrase here’);

You’ll find these lines in the wp-config-sample.php file as well.

These three unique phrases should be random. Anything 60+ characters and relatively random will work. They should each be different. In other words, you need three phrases, not one.

Note that doing this will invalidate all your login cookies, so everybody on your site will have to re-login, but doing it will greatly increase the cookie strength of WordPress 2.6. This means that your login cookies, if intercepted, won’t be able to be reproduced as easily. It also means that somebody who gains read-only access to your database through some other means won’t be able to login to your site.

** DO NOT SHARE YOUR SECRET KEYS BECAUSE THEN THEY WON’T BE SECRET **

Have you ever hear people saying try and try harder until you succeed. Well lets say you do succeed, then what? Or how about you are a complete failure then what? Should you keep going? I hate people who tell me Syed, try harder and you will do better. It might work in some cases, but in other cases it is a waste of time.

In this post, I will tell you that blogs are not suppose to last forever. There are blogs of all sort of subjects and niches. When you start a blog, you must create a work plan. How do you want to see this blog in three months, six months, year, and two years. You must always set a deadline during this plan. So I will stop blogging after two years of its launch. Ofcourse you don’t have to stick with this deadline because you analyze it later on the time.

So you have a very successful blog that is earning you over 10k a month. You love writing on it, and you are happy with the audience and attention you are getting. After two years when you were suppose to stop blogging, you don’t have to. Instead make a new plan that sees your goal and make another deadline. If for some case, you don’t reach your goals, and it turned out to be an extreme failure, then you know that it is time to stop and move on.

Specially when you are on a very specific niche. Lets say you wanted to make a cooking blog. You have 90 recipes to share. Well then you post once every 4 days with a good recipe, all the delicious looking pictures, maybe videos and so on. But after you are done with your recipes, you can stop blogging. Leave this blog be online, so you have user interaction, but your goal was done. Think of it as a book, you can’t keep going on and on in a book. You have to end your story some where.

Not all blogs are suppose to last forever. There is always a deadline. Even very popular blogs stops publishing content. Reason is that blogging takes a lot of time. When you are writing for a mass audience, you want to make sure that you write well. You want to make sure that you give them the absolute best article. Which can potentially distract you from other project of yours. So a deadline is always necessary.

Now there is nothing wrong with being a quitter. Because it doesn’t make a you a loser. It makes you a loser, if you quit without starting. As long as you tried your hardest, then don’t consider that attempt as a failure. It was just an attempt that didn’t work.

When you don’t have any more content to write, or if you think that the content you are writing is not worthy enough, then you should re-evaluate your plans again. You can even take the whole blog down once your goal is done. Not all blogs are started or run solely for monetary purposes. People have motives behind their blogs also. So follow your dreams, but remember dreams can be altered, or changed in anyway that you want to. Because your imagination can come up with infinite possibilies. So if one dream fails, there is no need to waste more time to drag this failed attempt. Instead think of something else.