Keeping up with comments can be hard enough without having to deal with spam comments. Most of these comments are from automated bots.
Most bloggers turn on that hard to read Captcha – seriously the Blogger Captcha is VERY difficult to read!
By turning on Captcha, you are actually making it harder for your readers to comment too. There’s not a lot you can do about spam on Blogger, but there are some ways to help prevent it from happening.
How to prevent spam comments on Blogger without turning away readers
1. Who can comment? Turn off Anonymous
Settings > Posts & Comments > Who Can Comment…
By choosing either Registered Users or Users with a Google Account, the user has to log in or sign up to leave a comment.
The benefit here is that most bloggers will probably already be logged into their Google account, but by disabling anonymous it will stop fake accounts and robots from leaving a comment as they won’t register just to place a link.
2. Comment Moderation
Settings > Posts & Comments > Comment Moderation
Choose always or sometimes to moderate comments before they go live on your site. I’d recommend turning it on sometimes for posts older than # days.
Spam bots crawl you’re site and will more than likely comment on an older post, turning this on will notify you and won’t go live unless you approve it.
3. Install a Third Party Commenting System
How to instal Disqus | How to instal IntenseDebate
Use Disqus or IntenseDebate for comments instead. These tend to get less spam in general. There is also an option to add “blocked” words that will go to spam if used.
You can also choose an option that if a certain amount of links are used, the comment will be marked as spam until you check it. I’ve used both, they are slightly different but both do a great job – my personal preference is Disqus.
You could also instal a Facebook Comment system on your blog which allows readers to comment via their Facebook profile.
4. Don’t be spammy
Don’t “spam” you’re own link on dodgy websites or forums. Spammers will easily find you on these sites and crawl your blog for an opportunity to leave a link. Although backlinks can help with blog traffic, not all links are valuable.
5 responses to “How to prevent excess spam comments on Blogger”
Thank you so much for this! I was bombarded overnight with about 100 spam comments! I have just turned on Google Accounts for comments and switched off anonymous. I was wondering if you could explain what the other option is – Registered Users? Is that for Blogger only? Or does that mean people can log in with FB, Twitter accounts etc? Thanks 😀
PS: Instant relief when I switched off anonymous – thank god!
Hello, Registered Users are anyone who has a Google/Blogger account, LiveJournal profile, WordPress account, AIM profile, TypePad account or OpenID account.
Thanks for this, they are all great tips. I had the first two set up that way already, but will definitely look into the third. At the moment, while I am still working on the blogs, I actually set the comments to members only, which might not be a great thing to do, since I think it will make it harder for people to comment at all? I just didn’t want to deal with lots of comments, if it happened while I am working on the blogs, and there is a contact form (thanks to you), that they can use, if they really want to. As for the extra tip, I actually don’t go out of my way to share my blogs, or social network pages, so I don’t get spammed a whole lot on the blogs. Wish I could say the same for the email accounts. Anyhow, the links are available, through my various pages, or SN’s, and then listed with blogger of course, but that’s it. I have lots of different interests, so people that also have those interests find me, and some of them actually stay / follow along, and it’s fine with me, to leave it like that. Once the cake blog is finished, and has more content, I might share that one a bit more. Finally, in the case of comments, like this one, where I have to include a URL, I will, but when it’s only optional, I often don’t. unless the comment is related to a project I am working on, and the place I am commenting. Thanks again for sharing your knowledge & skills!
Thanks for the article. Get a lot of spam comments on my blog.
I personally believe it to be a barreer to disable anonymous commenting. What if people have an opinion but no account they could use -but don’t want to set up an account just so they can comment? I want commenting to be barreer-free, so whenever I use blogger I turn off any restrictions, as my blogs aren’t giant projects with hundreds of readers it’s absolutely no problem at all. They’re very few and you can delete them quickly as long as you’re acive on your blog.