Too often, I find websites that struggle with their search engine visibility because of comment spam. Sadly, most of the time, these sites belong to local, small business owners and bloggers who have been told that allowing comments on their site is actually good for their online marketing strategy. Others are just not sure how to protect themselves from comment spam.

This week, I worked on cleaning up comment spam from two websites, Avalon Laser and Avalon Lipo & Aesthetics. One of them had more than 3,000 published comments, all of them spam. The other had more than 2,000 published spam comments and 25,000 in moderation. Yes, 25,000. Needles to say, I got to learn a lot about “herpes treatment,” and where to find the cheapest Louis Vuitton purse. Mostly, I got to learn how sad the whole situation truly is. Spammers from all over the world are targeting these sites to increase their online visibility while completely destroying these sites.

The best way to avoid the headache, is to protect yourself from comment spammers by taking the following steps:

1. Disallow anonymous posting on your blog
2. Use CAPTCHAs to prevent automated comments
3. At the very least turn on comment moderation
4. Use the “nofollow” attribute for any links that get posted in comments
5. Better yet, disallow hyperlinks in comments
6. Block comment pages using your robots.txt file or meta tags

If you are not sure how to do this, please consult with someone who can help. This can be someone you know, a web developer, an online marketer or a family member. But do something and don’t buy into the notion that allowing people to spam your site is actually good for your SEO. It is not.

If you are using WordPress Content Management System for your site or blog, please enable AKSIMET immediately. This is a very good anti-spam plug in that works. You can learn more about it here.