How to reduce spams on wordpress blogs?

One feature that has helped blogs to become popular is their interactive nature. It has now become easy for bloggers to get feedback and comments from the blog readers as well. However everything is not so fine. Bloggers have to deal with spams on a daily basis.  Fortunately Wordpress has some built-in spam protections such as Akismet and that can help spams. In this article I will show you how to set up Akismet for a newly-set up blog and also some settings that can help reduce the number of spam comments on your blog.

Setting up Akismet

• From your Dashboard go to the Plugin page
• Activate the Akismet Plugin
• At the top you will normally be asked to enter your Wordpress.com Api key
• You only have to sign for a Wordpress.com account and you will get a key by email
• Enter the Api Key and Akismet should be activated
• Now Akismet should take care of your spams

From time to time it is always a good idea to check the spam list for relevant comments that may have been marked Spam.

• From your Dashboard go to comments
• And click on the Spam tab
• You can either approve or Delete the comments

Additional tweak to prevent spams

By playing with some settings you can still reduce the number of comments even more.

• From your Dashboard
• Go to Settings and Discussion

From the other comment settings you can choose close comments on post after a specific numbers of days. Check the box if you want this.

You can also want to have an email each type someone post a comment or held comment for moderation. This can provide you an opportunity to monitor comments on your site.

Next you have the comment moderation box and comment blacklist box. These are powerful tools to protect your blogs from spam.

If you know the IP address or the emails of frequent spammers you can input it in the box so that their comments are marked for moderation or marked as spam each time they post something on your blog. Alternatively you can also use frequent words that are used in spam comments to ban them.

Wordpress also have some plugins that can help to protect against spam comments which we will cover in another article. If done properly the tips listed above can reduce dramatically the number of spams that you get on your blog.