How Akismet can fight spam on your WordPress site?
How Akismet can fight spam on your WordPress site?
Do you hate spam? Of course you do. And if you have a WordPress website, you know that spam comments come in all the time. Those comments are annoying and can hurt your site’s credibility. So, what can you do? Akismet can help.
Akismet is a plugin for your WordPress site that filters out your comment spam for you. Sure, you could filter it manually as comments come in, but as your business grows that can become time-consuming and certainly you have more important things to do than babysit the comments.
Akismet has been around since 2005 and keeps an average of 7.5 million pieces of spam off the internet every hour. Each comment is sent to the Akismet servers to check if the message is spam or not. The server checks not only the content in the comment, but also the comment user IP, user agent, referrer, post permalink, blog URL, blog name, blog language and user role. It does all this behind-the-scenes, which allows you to focus on more important things.
Why does comment spam matter? If malicious users post spam links or other malicious code into your site through comments, it could get flagged by Google or any other search engine and kill your search ranking or even be completely blocked by Google altogether. For example, if the spam comments get really bad, when you visit a site from a Chrome browser and Google has flagged your site to be harmful, you could see something like this instead:
You certainly don’t want your customers seeing that when they visit your business site, do you? To keep this from happening, websites should use something like Akismet, which catches spam comments using algorithms. Those algorithms are also able to learn from their own mistakes and from the actions taken by companies using the plug-in. For example, when a number of websites start reporting similar looking content as spam, Akismet will learn to identify that kind of content as spam in the future.
While Akismet is one of two plugins that is pre-installed in WordPress and has been one of the must-haves of WordPress plugins, you still have to take some extra steps to activate it and can learn more about that here: https://docs.akismet.com/getting-started/activate/ There are three different plan options with coverage for professional/commercial sites and blogs starting at $5 per month.
Red Technologies recommends Akismet to our WordPress users. Learn more about it here: https://akismet.com/
