Blogging Tip...Dealing With Spam on Your Blog

Today's blogging tip is about Spam...the junk email spam, not the spiced ham food product!! (the "sp" from spiced and the "am" from ham equals Spam.) That was my foody tip for today! Lol

I can't say I dislike both types of spam, because I haven't had the food product since I was little, but I really dislike the computer version.

What exactly is spam? In a word...junk. According to Microsoft, spam is "any kind of unwanted communication".

In most articles that I've read, email spams are unwanted, unsolicited emails to large groups for advertising of some product and are usually harmless.

However, when some spam emails try to trick the reader into doing something involving identify theft or fraud, that is called phishing. Please DO NOT be tricked by email scams that say they want you to change your pass word or enter any sort of personal numbers, unless you know the request is from the actual source.

Today's blogging tip is pretty much about the harmless email spam that I receive and you may also receive in your inbox and on your blog in the form of a comment.

As I mentioned earlier, most spam is trying to get you to click on their website, because they are selling something or they want you to click on the product website.

Here is a screen shot of a comment that I received in my email inbox. I have all my comments sent to my email, so I read it there first.

Usually the name is obscure, but they are getting smarter. They open a blogger account with no profile info so they can comment as a "blogger".

See at the end of the comment where there is the word "Curtain" in a link form? If you clicked on this it would lead you to a website to sell you curtains. They usually "match" the topic of the post to the link.

My post was on how to make lined drapes...hence the "curtains" link.

This is what it looks like in the comment section under that post. This Michelle Smith is not only are they trying to get "me" to click on it in my email, she is trying to get "you" to click on it too from the comment section.

This "Michelle Smith" hit me again on another post to advertise Hunter Douglas (which sells window treatments). It really is free advertising for them.

Well, let's take care of them!!

Go to your dashboard and click on COMMENTS.

In the comments section, there are 2 parts...published and spam.

Published are the comments that make it to your blog posts.

Spam are the ones that Blogger catches and sends to the spam box.

When you find the unwanted comment by post title or date, just hover over that comment and your choices are REMOVE, DELETE or SPAM.

In this example, I've clicked REMOVE CONTENT.

That just removes the comment words. Still keeps the authors name on the post.

Here is a screen shot of the comment if you pick REMOVE. It says "this comment was removed by blog administrator"

 If you pick DELETE, it removes everything from the post.

See? Gone!!

If you select SPAM, it marks it as spam and sends it to your spam box.

Click your SPAM folder every once in awhile to delete and to check if some good comments haven't made it through.

If there are good comments from real bloggers that haven't made it to one of your posts, just click NOT SPAM and it will send it to that post where it belongs.

The rest of the bad ones can be checked off and deleted.

Look at this comment on one of my posts...

I think they're trying to sell me golf supplies!! What do you think?

I try to clean out my comment spam box and my email spam box at least once a week if not more if I see a flood of them.

Hope this was helpful not only for spam, but for unwanted comments in general.

Happy Blogging,
~Karen~