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Comment spam can take a lot of the enjoyment out of blogging. Comment spammers operate in the same manner as email spammers – they use automated scripts to disperse their wares. Comment spammers use the comment capability of most blogs to distribute links to their web sites. If your blog has the "no_follow" attribute of comments disabled, then you may be unwittingly providing the comment spammers with some of your "link juice."
At a minimum, every blogger should enable the moderation feature for all blog comments. If your comments are unmoderated, you will soon see hundreds, if not thousands of irrelevant, spammy, link-filled comments on your blog posts.
Most blog platforms have spam filtering either built in or available as a plug-in. WordPress, which is my blogging platform, has a plug-in called Akismet, which is a very good spam filter.
Many of us learn about comment spam the hard way. What happens if you did not previously enable spam blocking and now you have 10,000 spam comments in moderation, or worse, showing up as comments on your blog posts? Fortunately there is an answer to this problem and the video demonstrates how to go about clearing spam posts in volume. The blog I use for my example is the Bankruptcy Law Network blog. This is a multi-contributor blog that accepts contributions from a select group of lawyers. The blog has been very successful in educating consumers and those in the legal community about Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but, as a group, we did not plan very well to when it came to moderating and processing comments.
Over the course of the past year, we found ourselves with over 10,000 unmoderated comments, most of which were spam. Worse, the size of the unmoderated comments table in the SEQL database that manages the WordPress blog made the manual, one-by-one processing of comments very slow and cumbersome.
After some looking around, I figured out how to deal with the spam comments in bulk and I show what I did in this screen capture video.
