Comment spam, blog-and-ping, RSS robots — they’re all a pain in the butt for anyone serious about business blogging.

How bad is the problem? According to some researchers, nearly 30 percent of blog posts today are spam. And once you add in spam comments, the number reaches upwards of 50 percent.

Blogs designed to spew spam on the world live web have a name now — splog. It’s listed in Wikipedia as something that is “often nonsense or text stolen from other web sites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites.”

It’s interesting to note that Wikipedia also notes that, “splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google’s Blogger service.” I almost wonder if Google is leaving that gaping whole open to learn how to come up with effective methods to adjust their search engine algorithms and discount these spam morons. That’s a subject of a whole nother post, but it’s interesting to take note of.

Anyway, as a business blogger, it can get pretty frustrating logging in to your admin area and then finding several dozen spam comments. And it can get even worse. Apparently higher ranked blogs get hit with more comment spam. I’ve had as many as 150-200 spam comments on this and another of our top ranked business blogs in a 24-48 hour period. Outrageous!

Luckily the open source community of programmers supporting WordPress have been hard at work creating plugins to help stop comment spam. But since we’ve been focusing on the launch of the Marketing With Business Blogs multi media coaching course over the last month or so, I haven’t had time to implement any programming updates on our blogs. But I have had the time to make one simple change that has cut our comment spam down by 98% — literally!!

5 simple steps to dramatically reducing comment spam on your business blog

Here’s what I did, and what you can do too if you’re dealing with lots of comment spam on your business blog (on WordPress.)

Step 1. For WordPress users, login into the admin area of your business blog. Click on the “options” tab, and then on the “discussion” tab. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a sub-heading titled “Before a comment appears:.” Make sure that the check box next to “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” is ticked. This is your first line of defense against spam comments going live on your business blog.



Step 2. Next, review all your comment spam for several days and keep a list/journal of common/repeated words. This will not take much time, and is actually pretty easy.

Step 3. Compile a list of single words used in comment spam. Review the list to be sure that none of those words is likely to be used in a legitimate comment to your business blog. (If you’re running a business blog about poker, I’m sorry but you’re going to be up the creek on this one. :))

Step 4. Again, for WordPress users, login into the admin area of your business blog. Click on the “options” tab, and then on the “discussion” tab. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you’ll see a sub-heading titled “comment blacklist.” Take that list of words you compiled and reviewed from your comment spam posts and paste it right into the text entry area under the “comment blacklist.”



And be sure to check th box next to “Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies” too.

Step 5. Click on “update options” and prepare yourself for a much more enjoyable business blogging experience.

By adding those spam words to your blacklist, you will never see any comments submitted for approval on your business blog. They’ll automatically be deleted by WordPress.

Here’s some help getting started

To save you some time and give you a good starting list to work with, here’s a list of common spam words to add to your blacklist.

hold’em
casino
casinos
baccarrat
poker
gambling
incest
poker
slot-machine
viagra
Phentermine
prozac
direct-tv
Levitra
quotationspage
quotegallery
forex
porn
Phentermine
bdsm
craps
blackjack
slots
pharmacy
cialis
prozac
loan
loans
ringtones
ringtone
backgammon

In the next few weeks I’ll share with you some other (more advanced) methods for stopping spam comments on your business blog. For now, start with these 5 simple steps. It’ll only take you a total of maybe 20-minutes, and it’ll save you whole lot of headaches.

Enjoy!

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


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