Comment Spam – Nuisance for Website Owners

Posted in : General Observations on by : Paul J. Fitzgerald , Comments: 5

After I set up my website, I set out to try to make it visible to those who might be looking for counseling help. I settled on using a blog as my main website page, and making the “About the Therapist” page the home page. WordPress, which is the open source software I’m using, is quite versatile and flexible. It’s been fun to work on improving my website by myself using WordPress and all the widgets and plug-ins that people have written to go with it.

From what I’ve read, one way to make a blog-based website more visible to search engines like Google is to add posts frequently, and to allow comments. Since I started tweaking the website, I’ve noticed a steadily increasing number of comments being posted. Hopefully, that means it’s more visible.

I have set up the site so that all comments must be authorized (or “moderated”) by me in order to be visible. So I’ve seen all kinds of attempts to post comments by people who apparently want to use lazy shortcuts to get links and increase their own website visibility. Some are all gibberish, some are laughable attempts to sound almost relevant by non-English speakers (“Great post! I can use this greatly in my task”) and some link to sites that purport to sell pain medication, sexy shoes, or small Japanese bathtubs. There are plug-ins that try to stop these spam comments, but they don’t catch many of them. I think it takes a real human reader to spot a phony comment. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will get good enough to reliably intercept them. In the meantime, I have to click “Spam it” frequently.

Takes all kinds to make a world. But I welcome any real comments!

CC BY-ND 4.0 Comment Spam – Nuisance for Website Owners by Fitzgerald Counseling is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.