Spam, similar to an annoying younger sibling is unavoidable and extremely sneaky. It can have a tremendous effect on how your customers perceive your blog image and many times makes your blog unprofessional. Fortunately there is a way to help limit how frequently spam appears in the comment section of your blog.
There is a wide range of plugins that WordPress provides should you decide you need that extra protection, but spammers are shifty and are constantly coming up with new ways to get around these various Plugins. The best way to prevent this is to annually check on your plugins to make sure they are up to date and the latest version.
One program that comes equipped with every website built on WordPress is Akismet. Akismet is a unique little Plugin that uses an algorithm to determine which comments are spam and which are not. It’s only $5 a month if your website makes any sort of money and is very easy to activate and extremely user friendly.
Once you activate Akismet you will notice an additional menu added to the Comments panel with a complete list of all the spam that has been detected. Akismet uses a community created database as well so if you notice spam in your comments section mark it as “comment spam” instead of deleting it and it will be automatically added to the database.
If you are noticing that the comments you are writing are being marked as spam, there is a way to prevent this as well by simply removing comments from the Akismet Panel. Though it might take more then one repeated visit to the panel, Akismet will eventually pick up on your comments and not label them as spam.
By: Zack King