One of the most common forms of comment and pingback spam right now is the relatively subtle, ambiguous kind — short phrases or questions that are not obviously spam, at least on face value. The more sophisticated spammers have progressed from old standbys like “nice post” and “great blog”, to more cunning things like questions (”where can I download your theme?”) and appeals to your helpful nature (”I’m having trouble subscribing to your RSS feed”).
Akismet almost always catches these kinds of bogus comments.
The tip-off of course is that they often include a link to a site that’s advertising dubious or sleazy merchandise (or worse, a web site that harms the viewer’s computer). But it’s easy to forget to look at the link before approving a comment, or give the comment author the benefit of the doubt without checking closely. And spammers have recently learned to post several comments over time, the first of which contains no link or obvious clue. (We call these precursor spams).
Anyway, a comment is a comment, right, so what’s the harm in approving a few tame platitudes, even if they were posted by spammers?
Unfortunately it is harmful, and most of the damage is to your own site.
By moving these comments out of your spam folder and publishing them on your blog, you’re doing three things, all of them bad:
- You are undermining your site’s SEO.
- You are attracting more spammers.
- You are damaging your reputation.
You might not click on the links in all the comments on your blog, but some of your readers will. And some of those links will go to sites that are sleazy, offensive, or harmful.
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Thanks for sharing. A good read article.