If you’re business blogging and are dealing with a significant amount of comment spam, here’s some great info for you — especially if you’re business blogging with WordPress.

We’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks putting the finishing touches on the home study version of the Marketing With Business Blogs. And that project, along with questions coming in from students of the multimedia coaching course, has had me doing a lot of research. One of the things I’ve been doing is scouring the net for WordPress plugins that’ll help business bloggers with their marketing and administrative efficiency.

A little over a month ago I decided to start testing various solutions to stopping comment span. I was pretty frustrated with this problem myself (although my assistant was the one who was doing the actual ‘house cleaning.’ :)) But when students of the blogging course started to pepper us with questions on how to stop this problem I realized how this administrative problem could really get in a way of busy business owners who want to market efficiently with business blogs. (Remember that comment spam is not only ugly… it also saps away valuable points in your search engine rankings.)

Since we were dealing with a ton of comment span here at Advanced Business Blogging and on our other business blogs, I figured we could provide the Guinea pigs for testing. So over the last 40-days or so we’ve tried five different anti-comment spam solutions on five separate business blogs, and here are the results.

Five anti-comment spam solutions — with one BIG winner!

Unfortunately there are a lot of supposed “solutions” out there that spammers simply laugh at. To save you time and frustration I’m going to share with you what we found. Let’s take a quick look at the solutions we tested starting with the least efficient and working our way down to the hands-down winner.

#5 Keyword Blacklists: This is a baseline protection in WordPress and many other blog systems. It’s simple a list of ’spam words.’ This may have worked at an acceptable level in the past, even up to as recently as six months ago. But this elementary solution has now been easily (and nearly completely) circumvented by spammers. Trying to keep your keyword blacklist up to date will quickly become frustrating even with just one business blog, never mind multiple blogs.

#4 Captchas: If you’re not familiar with what Captchas are — they’re the funky little image boxes with distorted words that you’re asked to type out before submitting some type of information online. They do work, functionally. There is no way that spammers are going to bypass a captcha system on your business blog.

The downside of Captchas is that they’re not user-friendly. They break up the natural flow of the commenting process. And some versions are very difficult, if not impossible, for people with poor eyesight to read. On the blog we tested captcha on we saw a significant drop-off in the number of comments and trackbacks. That’s not a major issue when you’re only focused on improving your search engine rankings with your business blog. But as you know — business blogging is ultimately about building your subscriber list and the relationships you have with people on that list. Any drop off in commenting is a major issue when you’re looking to gather valuable feedback from your clients and target audience.

#3 Bad Behavior: This is a WordPress plugin that used to work pretty well from what I’ve read. But in our tests it was not capable of stopping certain spammers.

I’m no programmer, but from the research I’ve done the reason seams to be that Bad Behavior is focused on stopping bots that take unusual actions when on your site. (”Bots” is short for “robots” that spider or take other actions on your site server.) Since spammers have deep pockets they’re able to constantly make these bots smarter, so there are an increasing number of spam comments that get through.

#2 Akismet: This anti-comment spam solution seemed to fair pretty well. But there’s a big reason I’ve ranked it #2. Although it did in impressive job of stopping comment spam, I did notice a pretty high incidence of legitimate comments being tagged as spam. Some other concerns I have around this solution include reliability. It’s a free solution, but it runs on a third party server. (I’ve never been a big fan of third party hosted solutions as you have no control over their server reliability or up time.)

#1 Spam Karma2 (SK2): This is the solution we found to be the most affective in stopping comment spam. And it’s the easiest to use. This is another WordPress plugin, and it does an outstanding job of stopping spammers from using comments and trackbacks on your business blog.

It’s an extremely robust solution that provides lots of options for advanced users. But don’t worry! Although SK2 does have dozens of customizable options across five different areas of management — you can just ‘load it and leave it.’ Even with no customization you can expect to see a radical reduction in the amount of comment and trackback spam.

For example during the first two weeks in testing this solution I didn’t change one setting. And we realized a 95% reduction in comment spam! Further tweaking resulted in automated blocking of 98% of all comment spam.

The best thing is that SK2 is ‘intelligent.’ As you manage your comments and as SK2 builds its blacklist of IP addresses, virtually all spam gets stopped dead in its tracks.

No comment spam stopper will work forever without updates

In a recent post the creator of SK2 (Dr. Dave) raised some questions on the long term effectiveness of SK2 with some of the new aggressive advancements being made by spammers. In his lengthy article The State of Spam (Karma), Dr. Dave says that SK2 will need some upgrades to stay effective. But that’s coming from a programmer.:) As business owners marketing with blogs, we haven’t noticed any decrease in Spam Karma’s effectiveness as of yet.

If you use a WordPress blog for your business and marketing — Spam Karma 2 is the #1 spam stopper solution we recommend! (And if you find it helpful, consider throwing Dr. Dave a contribution.)

The bottom line

As spammers continue to advance their tools and try to attack your business blog from new angles, your diligence will be required. You need to pay attention to this to maintain your efficiency as you market with business blogs. But with SK2 on your side, you’ll have a reliable defensive tool on your side to save you time, frustration, and search engine rankings.Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Click-and-Mortar Business Coach he helps small business owners integrate offline and online marketing strategies for rapid, reliable business growth. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].