I finally started getting comments on my website and was thrilled. The hard work was paying off, people were finally visiting my website, reading the articles, and engaging in my posts.

They said such nice things like “this article has really helped me,” “I enjoyed reading this” and “Keep up the good work.”

Ok, so the names of the commentors were a bit strange: headlamp walmart, biden we just did or กรองหน้ากากอนามัย, but the email addresses looked genuine: donharriman@gmail.com, sheldonedouard@yahoo.de, and they were saying such nice things, they had to be authentic.

But then came the spelling and grammatical mistakes, the irrelevant comments and I began to wonder. Next, the comments got decidedly iffy: more and more were in foreign languages and definitely included the word ‘escort.’ Their email addresses contain domains I had never heard of: name@gawab.com, name@bigstring.com, name@mail.ru

Mistakes included:

“this is my first time pay a visit at here and i am in fact impressed to read all at alone place.”

“A big thank you for your article.” When it wasn’t an article.  

“really like whatever you guys are usually up too. These kinds of clever work and exposure!”

“Keep up to date the fantastic work guys I’ve incorporated you guys to my blog roll.”

However, it was the genuine names in the email addresses that made me pause before I deleted the comments. What if these comments had been posted by people interested in my books?

But I was still suspicious and decided to do some investigating.

Every comment included an IP address, the commentors name, a link (like Facebook or their site), their email address and the comment. I clicked on some of the links and found they were online shopping sites for masks, online gambling, or beauty products in another country.

How could I tell which comments were genuine and which were not? Not all were easy to set aside as spam. I found a site, where I could search whether an email address is genuine. This helped. With Email Checker, I could search 5 emails addresses, for free, every twenty four hours, but even this site was duped sometimes.

I had to take a decision.

I have decided that if the comment is non-specific, does not include a real name (just a fake name such as biden we just did) and the email address has nothing to do with this name, then it is not a real person.  

Apart from this, what other clues are there, that a comment is most probably spam?

• It is not specific to the article that it is commenting on.
• The comment is made on an older article, not the most recent ones.
• Search for the comment online. These generic comments are often copied and pasted, word for word from the internet.  I looked online and found this to be the case.  

Does it matter if a site has spam comments? Well, yes

• It can make the site look unprofessional
• It can cause the site to lose repeat visitors because of the spam comments and links  
• Search engines do not like spam on websites and so the website ranking will go down.

Can it be stopped?

Unfortunately, the answer is no, but it can be controlled. Once a website starts gaining popularity and more traffic is visiting the site, spam comments will continue to increase. However, it is possible to moderate comments before they appear on a website. On wordpress, the comment settings can be changed, so all comments can be moderated before posting. An email notification will alert that a comment has been left and then at a convenient time, it can be reviewed and approval given to allow the comment to appear on the site.    

As I type this, I am still getting more and more spam each day, but I have learnt how to stop it appearing on my site first and moderate it. Perhaps the positive I can take from this is that my site must be gaining visitors, and is engaging with an audience, because why else would spammers want to post?