I just read some Blogger hosted blogs (otherwise known as “Blogspot”) and I am irritated to see a lot of spam comments and even malware links found in those comments.
So if you use Blogger platform (which is owned by Google) to publish your blog posts online, how do you able to prevent spam?
Unlike WordPress where you can use the power of Akismet and WordPress WP-Spamfree plugins, these type of anti-spam arsenal is not available in Blogger. What you can in Blogger is just to rely on its built in anti-spamming tools. These are found in the comments admin console of your Blogger Dashboard.
To do this:
Step1: Login to your Blogger account.
Step2: Under “Manage Blogs” click “Settings” link for that specific blog that you would like manage or prevent spam comments from appearing.
Step3: Go to “Comments” section.
Step4: You need to configure the following (if some items are not included, this means they are not adjusted or just leave using their default values)
Who can comment: “Users with Google accounts” (you need to restrict them by having them sign for a Google account). This will not only help or filter spammers but lets Google knows who are spamming blogs and get their account suspended or IP blocked as early.
Backlinks: “Hide”, of course this can be used for malicious purposes such as showing the domain with malware as the backlink, and if your readers will click on it, they might possibly get infected.
Comment moderation: “Always” – this will ensure that all comments that went live in your blog are moderated, clean and spam free.
Show word verification for comments? – “Yes” – this further prevent spam bots from spamming blogs and filter human from a bot.
Comment notification email – [yourworkingemailaddress@domain.com] – make sure this is a working email address so that you will be notified with any new comments appearing in your blog. You will need to moderate it before it will go live.
Step5. Finally Save settings.
So how do you know that your blog still have spam comments leading to spammy/malware websites? You either need to sign up for Google webmaster tools and examine the data reported there.
Or you can use Xenu sleuth:http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html , download and install it to your computer. Scan your blogspot address http://yourblogspotname.blogspot.com/ and examine for any abnormalities in the external links. Just leave “Check External links” option unchecked, so that you can easily distinguish external from internal links by color of the result (external links are colored blue)
You will need to examine only the external links, make sure all those are APPROVED by you or harmless to your readers.
