One of the most annoying things I can think of is spam comments. Several days ago I opened my email to find that I had over 250 comments posted to one of my blogs and more emails where coming! I knew that I was getting spammed, and hard.

Fortunately for bloggers, as spam comments have grown, so has the ways to prevent it. Here are a couple ways that you can prevent spam comments from even being posted on your blog, and even a way to keep the more persistent ones away from your site completely.

Write down the  IP addresses and log into your hosting cPanel. Click on the deny IP address access to your site.  Type in the IP addresses and hit the button.  It works like a charm.

Close off commenting on older blog posts

There are options for you to stop comments from being posted on any particular blog post. Lots of times, spammers will post comments in weeks or months old posts. So take away this opportunity from them to keep it from happening. Most blog hosts now offer this as a standard option in the tool panel. If one of your posts has been up for a couple weeks, close it up.

 Take advantage of software offered to prevent comment spam

If you host your own blog using WordPress, you can use an option in that software to prevent spam. Even if you aren’t using WordPress, you can still use other Spam comment blocking software like Spam Karma, Akismet, and Bad Behavior. While these aren’t 100% effective, they have proven to be quite effective in preventing spam from happening.

 Take a look at your settings and see what can be tweaked to toughen your protection

Lots of blogs now have settings to help prevent spam. If you already have a spam blocker on in your blog and are still experiencing spam, take a closer look at the settings to see if there’s anything that can be tweaked to make your protection stronger. However, if you do this, you should closely monitor your posts to make sure legit comments aren’t being blocked out. If they are, you might have to lighten up a bit.

Regularly read your blog comments

Be sure to keep an eye on your comments. Even the best software or setting can’t prevent everything, so you may have to occasionally  remove comments on your own.

By applying the above principles, you can ensure that your blog is full of only good, quality comments. And for some extra tips and tricks for using your cPanel I suggest cPanel for Newbies.