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Get Rid of Blog Comment Spam

One of the blogs I manage had started getting lots and lots of Comment Spam. I tried a number of spam protection techniques, including Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, but it didnt work out. Even disabling ‘Add Comment’ and making it available to only registered users didn’t work out. The number of Comment spams to the blog increased to 5 comment spams every 5 minutes, which was really annoying.

I finally found the solution to all this when I came to know that most of these Blog Comment Spams are generated by Trackbacks and Pingbacks.

You can use the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin to get rid of Comment Span, or simply un-check the check box for Trackback notifications from your WordPress Admin panel under the ‘Options >> Discussions‘ tab. This will disable pingbacks and trackbacks on any new posts that you add to your blog.

Once you’ve updated the options, you’ll need to modify the pingback status for your old posts by running a simple SQL query in the SQL Tab of phpMyAdmin after selecting your Blog Database:

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE ping_status=’open’

Alternately, you can run the simpler version of this SQL query

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ 😉

This will set the ping status for all your previous posts to 0 and will help you get rid of thousands of unwanted spammy Blog Comments.

PR Increase for Internal Page!

I just noticed and found that one of the internal pages of my site got PR 4 recently! The page is for Search Engine Friendly Directories which gives a list of many directories, free and paid, where you can submit your website. The page jumped from PR 0 to PR 4 due to the links coming back to it. Some data centres still show PR 0, whereas the others show Page Rank 4.

You can see the PR changes on different data centres using this PR check tool.