Besides lots of benefits, running a website means that you may suffer from headaches and one of them is content spam. When you enable comments on your site, the spam problem is inevitable and you can't prevent it entirely.

The more popular your site is, the larger this issue become. Fortunately, there are lots of tools and method you can take advantages of. So what is spam and its influence on your website?

Spams are short, generic automated messages posted by spam bots. Generally, these spams include links. There are some bad influences:

  • It is difficult for you to refine your real or potential customers; thereby, it's difficult to have conversations with these customers.
  • Spams make your site unprofessional.
  • Most of these links are malicious and these links are designed to trick visitors into giving away personal information.

Obviously, these influences caused the site performance. Therefore, preventing your website from spammers is a vital task that every website owners need to practice. Luckily, there are 6 simple methods that you can apply to stop comment spam from appearing on your website.

  1. Limit the number of links allowed per post

Applying this way allows you to limit the number of links in a comment. It also means that by this way, you will prevent your real customers from including many links in their comments. However, you see, slowing down comment spam can be worth that potential inconvenience.
It's truly a simple method that you can easily set up from your WordPress Dashboard. Navigate to Settings > Discussion > Change in Comment Moderation section. In this option, you can set any number, even 0 to completely stop links in comments.

  2. Create a "blacklisted word" collection

By and large, a range of recognizable words are included in many spam comments and you absolutely stop these words from appearing on your website. Whenever a comment posted contains one of these words, it will directly be sent to the trash.
Go to Setting > Discussion > Add words to Comment Blacklist.
However, when you apply this method, you also need to choose this "blacklisted" collection carefully to make sure that you will not delete comments of your real customers.

  3. Only registered users allowed to post comments

​WordPress offers an amazing option that allows you to restrict comment privileges on your website. You can enable this option so that only users must be register on your site before they post an comment. By this way, you can create an obstacle to prevent spammers from posting their comments, then, they can move to other targets.

To enable this option, you go to Setting > Discussion > Other Comment Settings. 

In this section, you easily find and check the option: Users must be registered and logged in to comment.

 4. Enable a comment moderation system

​This simple method allows you to enable a moderation system easily. It means that any comments posted on your site must be reviewed and approved by the admin. 

To enable this option, you navigate to Settings > Discussion > in Before a comment appears section, you check to enable "Comments must be manually approved". With this method, you can manage which comments will appear on your website.

5. Install an anti-spam plugin

​Another simple-but-powerful method for you is to use an anti-spam. WordPress is a massive collection of plugins and you can easily find a suitable one. 

Some well-known plugins you can think of are Akismet Anti-Spam or Antispam Bee.

  6. Use a new comment system

​The final solution for you to reduce content spam is to move to a new comment system such as Disqus or use Facebook comments. Although this method may not work for all sites, you can try if it's the right way for your site. 

In the nutshell, content spam is a common problem that any website owners should pay attention. You can select one of methods above or you can combine them so that you can minimize the number of spam on your site. Also, if you have any favorite method, don't hesitate to share with us in the Comments section. 

Thanks so much for reading!