Three Things That Make Spam Comments Dangerous for Your Site
Among the main problems that site owners often face is spam in comments. This malicious activity makes a big load on the website as well as threaten its real statistics.
Why are spam comments posted? There are three main reasons for that:
- Advertising. A robot (most often spam comments are their work) publishes an advertisement with a link to a site, where you can buy or order something.
- Malicious intentions. Such comments are similar to regular ads, but the link leads to a virus, a phishing site, or simply to some tricking places, where users can buy something at a big discount — but after receiving the money the scammers hide.
- Link promotion. A real person, who finds pages that suit him on the subject, can engage in publishing and then writes a comment that will contain a link to the resource he needs.
Why do such comments appear on your site? Because the site is not configured to protect from them. If messages are published automatically, without moderation, then you need to add a certain protection mechanism to the site that will allow you to cut off such comments. For example, you can pay attention to WP antispam tools as https://cleantalk.org/wordpress-anti-spam-plugin.
Why Are Spam Comments Dangerous?
There are three important points why spam comments can be dangerous for your site:
Spam comments redirect users to other resources. Because of this, you are losing traffic. This is dangerous not only for users but also for your reputation.
Links that are not related to the theme of your site may affect the ranking of the site and its place in the search results.
Finally, users themselves negatively perceive spam comments. Who would write a comment or message if it is spammed with comments from bots? Having spam comments is a direct way to lose messages from real users.
The first thing to do to protect your site from spam is to properly configure comment forms or guest book entry forms. For example, it is necessary to check that all required fields of the form are filled in and the email address of the sender is valid.
If there are not many comments on the site, you can manually protect it from spam. Usually, before posting, all comments are moderated — they are checked by the administrator for spam links. This method works until there are no more comments on the site: hundreds and thousands of comments a day are difficult to process manually. In this case, give your preference to automatic means of protection.
Conclusion
Spam is a serious problem — mainly due to dangerous links and files that may be inside the message. Spam is a serious problem, especially for inexperienced users. Therefore, even if you are sure that your website is secured from scammers, be sure to protect it with all the possible means of anti-spam protection.
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Note: Some of the information in samples on this website may have been impersonated or spoofed.