5 harmless ways to kick spam out of your blog

 Have you ever had an e-mail? Well… if it is the case, probably you know spam by experience and you are aware of how annoying could it be. Unfortunately, spam is present in the blogs world too, and doesn’t matter the kind or size of your blog sooner or later you will get some spam trying to bother you; dealing with spam in comments, trackbacks or pingbacks could become a real headache and for those ones that don’t have any experience fighting against because when it’s not treated correctly spam can suck out all the SEO of your block and ruin your blog quality regarding your users perspective or in front of search engines.

Because the relevancy that spam has taken into the blog’s world plenty of solutions have been developed, but the problem with most of them is that they are intrusive and could annoy or discourage your legitimate users to submit comments by implementing some sort of real-humans system recognition, like captchas. But no everything is lost! we have made the quest for the top-5 no-intrusive anti-spam mechanism that will help you to keep your blog healthy and spam-free!. And here they are:

Akismet:

It’s not a coincidence that the automatic kismet plug-in (Akismet) is included by default in every WordPress package, Akismet is a powerful tool and the first line of defense that every blogger should use to fight against spam.  The power of Akismet comes from the fact that Akismet checks every single comment that is submitted to your blog against the Akismet web service, a huge worldwide register of spam sources and spam comments characteristics. So if a spam comment is submitted to your blog there are 99.0% of probabilities that it will be detected and flagged as Spam, but in the rarely case that some spam comment bypass the Akismet system when you detect it manually flag it as spam the Akismet system learns about it, so the whole web service is being constantly improved by the users.
As we said Akismet comes by default with new WordPress packets, but you have to enable it, into the plugins section of your blog, and in order to make it functional you will need an API key to use it, keys could get free of charge into the Akismet page, and also you can get a professional account key for around $5.00 per month if you are running a business blog or a blog that brings more than $500.00 of revenue per month. Trust me is a fair price for what you get.

Bad Behavior:

The Bad Behavior plugin is the perfect companion for Akismet or any other spam detection system running in your blog. While plugins like Akismet check the comments submitted to your blog to see if they are spam or not, the Bad Behavior plugin focus in analyze the behavior of your users looking for some suspicious behavior that will qualify them as spammers. The plugin base its analysis on a variety of factors like the delivery method of comments or the particular software used for it, trying to stop the spam and the robots which deliver it, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place.

WP Captcha-Free:
The WP Captcha-Free is a simple but smarty idea to fight against spam, and specifically against spam which comes from automated systems (like robots) without needing to use a Captcha. Its mechanism is very simple it inserts (using AJAX) a hash based on time and some other parameters into the comments form, the fundamental idea is that when bots load the comments form (or post directly to it) they are unable to see the AJAX function that loads the hash, so when they don’t submit the hash code the comment is assumed to be a spam comment and the system block it.

Math Comment Spam Protection:

From the anti-spam methods that require some end-user participation to be identified as a human being, this particular plugin is the most harmless. Instead of asking your users to decode some random text show as an image and fill a input with it (what the captchas do, and could result very annoying) it just asks your users to answer a really simple math question.  Quite simple, right? but fortunately, it has proved to be a very accurate method to fight spam.

Simple Trackback Validation:
Unfortunately for us, comments are not the single source of spam in our blogs, spam could come in the form of pingbacks and trackbacks as well. And this particular form of spam could be very harmful to our blogs because it can rest the visibility of our blogs regarding the search engines (in other words it is bad for our SEO). The simple trackback validation plugin helps us to stop this specific form of spam, performing some tests to check if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and if the page with the URL included into the trackback does have a link to our blog.

As a final thought remember that you can use a combination of anti-spam tools to fight against spammers, the main goal is to keep your blog spam-free!.