Every time I get a spam comment on my blog, it usually goes into the spam queue. Occasionally it goes into the Pending queue. This doesn't mean it is a legitimate comment (although the spam queue doesn't guarantee it's spam, either).

The issue is how to identify a spam comment. A lot of blogs seem to fall into one of the following categories:

1. They assume that spam goes into the spam queue, and anything else must not be spam.
2. They don't know if something is spam or not.
3. They approve borderline comments to make the blog look busier.
4. They approve relatively non-spammy comments, but then the same person starts posting spam.

Spam is a big problem, but it can be dealt with. I'm not going to tell you to use a specific anti-spam plugin - for instance, I've seen a lot of WordPress blogs who use Akismet but somehow end up with loads of spam on their blogs.

Here are some tips for determining whether a comment is spam or not.

Keyword spam. "Real Estate", "Amoxcillin" and "Make Money Online" are not real names. They are keywords. Some blogs adopt a "no keyword spam" policy and will only let you comment with your real name. I'm not sure this should be an explicit policy - spammers aren't going to come back and check if their comments came up on every blog they posted on. They may not even be visiting the blog directly - their comments could be posted automatically by a script.

Generic comments. If you're ever unsure of a comment, try putting a portion of it into Google. You may have to try a few different variants as it's quite common for spammers to change a word here and there. Here is a spam comment I just received:

Thank you for well written article. But I had difficulty navigating through your website because I kept getting 502 bad gateway error. Just thought to let you know.

On the face of it, this may look like a real comment. However, try putting the following sentence into Google:

But I had difficulty navigating through your website because I kept getting 502 bad gateway error

I found 3,770 results. The reality is that this is a generic comment and it's been posted on a lot of different blogs. It may not always be posted with a link, but there's a reason for that...

Real commenters turning into spammers. You may have noticed that on many blogs, if you post a comment that gets approved, your future comments will be auto-approved. Spammers have realised this, and as a result I've seen a few comments from people who initially post something without a link, but their second or third comment is blatant spam - and it gets approved automatically. Ensure you have comment notifications turned on even if the comments are approved automatically - it's wise to keep an eye on what's being posted on your blog!

Nonsense comments. Now this is a good one. I'm not sure how many of these are blog comments, but try searching Google for the following sentence:

Everything dynamic and very positively!

After a few of these comments across several of my blogs, this annoying phrase started to burn into my mind - a memory I couldn't shift. It seemed to be a very common spam comment. I just searched Google and found 15.4 million results for this phrase. That's ridiculous.

Comments on old posts. Some blogs have started to close old posts to avoid comment spam piling up. I have noticed that my older posts get hit harder than the newer ones, but I only close the posts that attract an unusually high amount of spam - most of my posts do not.

Keeping an eye on your blog will take time, but not doing so can damage your reputation. I've seen some very high profile blogs with horribly spammy comments - even some businesses get spammed.

Don't approve spam comments! Maybe this goes without saying. But you really need to check your comments for spam. Don't think it won't happen to you - maybe it already has.

Try Injader's Spam Rules feature. Completely sick of comment spam, I developed a new feature for Injader where you can easily filter out comments with certain names, URLs, emails, IP addresses or text within the body of the comment. You can read more about this in the Spam Rules guide.

How much spam do you get on your blog? How do you deal with it?

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