Comment Spam in Wordpress
If you have a blog with a decent PR, your blog is exposed to a specific kind of automated link spam attack called commentspam. A botlike program crawls the web, identifies the blogs, and tries to post comments to each and every message it finds with backlinks to the spammer’s site. And this is what I am experiencing recently.
By default, I turned the comments option off as a guard against comment spamming. Nevertheless, and to my disappointment, Wordpress (at least Version 1.5) is unable to defend itself against comment spamming even if the comments option is turned off. My blog receives some 50 comment spams a day on the average. All are related to some credit card, mortgage, casino, travel or pharmacy sites selling viagra or similar drugs.
Thanks to God they are not published automatically, as I checked the “moderation required” option to moderate any comments. But I need to check my blog once in a while to delete all the comments posted so as to prevent the blog database from swelling too much.
I recently read a post in Google’s blogpost on comment spam again. It recommends using “nofollow” attribute for links in comments to fight against comment spam. But it is of no avail in many cases. It only tells the search engine(s) that you do not vouch for the link, that the link is “worthless” to visit. It does not prevent the spammer from stuffing your page with keywords that are in no way related to your site or the topic of your page. The only way is to ban such comments alltogether.
Perhaps it is time to upgrade my wordpress. I will check if the Wordpress 2 has a way to prevent such automatic posting of comments.