In this video Evan Carmichael answers a viewer’s question about how to stop comment spam on a WordPress blog. He shows his own site’s backend, noting 34,000 total comments with 2,200 marked as spam, and explains that as a blog grows, spam volume inevitably rises. Evan recommends three main strategies: (1) use the Akismet plugin as the primary spam filter, keep its API key active and always update the plugin; (2) adjust WordPress Discussion settings—auto‑approve repeat commenters and hold for moderation any comment containing three or more links; (3) delegate moderation to a team member or virtual assistant via WordPress user roles, limiting the owner’s time spent on spam. He also suggests that if spam remains overwhelming, disabling comments altogether may be preferable, emphasizing that writing content should not be hindered by moderation. Throughout, he encourages viewers to keep blogging, share their own spam‑fighting methods, and engage with the video via likes and comments.
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Hey, it's Evan, and today I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Ronnie. Ronnie, thank you so much for writing in. Love you, YouTube guys. Ronnie wrote in to say, how do I stop all the spam on my WordPress blog? It's so time-consuming to delete and find that I've stopped posting because it just opens up the door for more spam and I don't have time to devote to cleanup. I must be missing something. Surely it shouldn't be this time-consuming and difficult. Frustrated. Ronnie, I feel your pain. I went through the same thing, and you know what? The more popular your blog gets, the more spam you're going to get. I mean, that's one of the prices of being popular, I guess. I've dealt with it a few ways, and hopefully you can learn. I'm going to share with you some of the things that I do that you can leverage. I'm going to load up my blog. This is my backend on the blog. You can see I've had 3,400 posts, 34,000 comments, 31,000 are approved. 2,200 are spam. And if I go to my comments, for the most part, um, they're pretty good. So there's some comments that have come in. Uh, if I look at what's pending, there's a few. Some of these still do require some manual approving. So hi Evan, so few people seem to realize they've overcome, they've already overcome the biggest risk. So Gary has provided some great, um, comment here on the post so I can approve that. This one, "My brother and friends recommended I am like this website." This is where I'm kind of on the fence because English is not the first language and this doesn't look like a spammy comment, but do I approve it or not? I usually make a judgment call. This one, he's just trying to add to the conversation even though the English isn't perfect. It's not a spam, he used a real email account, so I'd approve that. But if I look in my spam folder, you'll see thousands, and these get deleted, I want to say every 30 days. It gets anything in my spam folder just gets deleted so it doesn't add up and add up and add up. What you'll find is a mix of people, people who will try to post something that's kind of related, you know, nice articles, but then if you look at it, it's UGGs glove and it's some spammy website here that's showing up. I have to check every now and then to see what is in here too because this one might work. You know, very true, you got to take some chances. This one doesn't look like it's a spam. I don't know, Alfred Real Estate, but it relates to this topic, so I could say not spam as an example, and that could be posted. And then you get some that are just totally, you know, flat-out spam, like what the heck is this? I don't know what— whatever this thing is, and, you know, spammy website, and it'll just get removed. So having great spam filters is definitely a great way to do it. And how I built it up, there's a couple things that can help you. The first is having the plugin, and you should already have Akismet. This is the main one that I use, and WordPress usually comes with this by default, and this does a great job of eliminating the spam. You need to sign up for an Akismet API key. Always make sure that this is up to date. So whenever this says that it's out of date, go get the newest version because it does most of the heavy lifting for me in limiting the spam that comes in. So you definitely want to update this, and then beyond, you can also edit your settings. So in discussion here, Some of the settings that I have here are I don't approve every comment manually and I don't get it emailed to me all the time, but I find these two ones are really important. So if somebody has already had a comment that's been approved before, then it'll get posted, it'll be approved again. I'm assuming that somebody has done a good job in commenting before, they're gonna do a good job ongoing. So a little bit of trust factor there. Usually spammers don't have great comments and then crappy comments. They just start right away with the crap. So that's why I have this checked off. So if they've already approved the comment, then they get in the next time. And maybe by showing this, I'm opening myself up to a lot of spam. Anyway, the other one is if somebody has 3 links or more in their post and it gets flagged as well, so it doesn't get automatically posted as a comment, it'll get held for moderation. Those are the 2 things that come up, and I find that these settings, along with keeping AccuSmet up to date, really help me. The last thing I do is I do not usually do a lot of the comment filtering myself. I've set up somebody on my team and her responsibility is to go through the comments and approve the ones that are good, to let me know if I need to respond to some of them. So I can approve this one here that we just took off. And so I don't do this myself and you can set that up easily. You can have, under users, you can set up other people to come on. So here's your user options. You can add a new user. And you can set up a virtual assistant to come in, even if it's once a day, to go in and approve comments and just move the other ones to spam. It could save you a lot of time and help you focus on the bigger picture. Worst case, if it's still bogging you down, you don't want to spend a couple bucks an hour, whatever it is, to hire somebody to do that for you, and it's still causing a lot of problems for you, I would then just eliminate comments. Because I don't want it to hold you back from writing. Writing is so important. It's getting your opinion out there. You have content that could be shared and you're sharing your voice with the world and it's so critical because you need word-of-mouth marketing to promote your business. So if it's the comments that are holding you back, this has worked for me. And again, I've had, I forget how many comments, what did I say? 30, 31,000 approved comments. So I've got a lot of comments that I've had to sort through. And for the most part, these two tools work for me. But if you're still finding that it's just too overwhelming and you can't have somebody help you with it, then just eliminate comments. But make sure that you keep writing because it is so important for your business. So hopefully this has helped. You can see here Akismet is protecting me from almost half a million spam comments already. So it's got a ton of spam as well, and I know it's a frustrating problem, but hopefully it doesn't hold you back from continuing with your blog. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd love to hear if you're fighting spam with another way that I haven't discovered yet, and share it with me and share it with Ronnie as well. If you guys like the video, thumbs up. If you have a comment, let me know. Question, let me know. Feedback below, I'll make a video response. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
