If you go online, chances are you’ve seen spam somewhere. But what if you are a business owner and your website is being flooded with spam?

1. Spammers, Bots, and Your WordPress Website
If you go online, chances are you’ve seen spam somewhere. But what if you are a
business owner and your website is being flooded with spam?
One of our long-time clients sent us a question recently:
“Do you have any advice in preventing bots from sending spam comments to our website? I
get a lot of bogus comments and delete them, but is there a way to prevent this?”
Spamming, simply put, is a method of sending many unsolicited messages on websites or
services. When a website receives bogus comments that are unrelated to the blog content,
and ridiculous emails from online forms, this is a form of website spam. Advertisers,
scammers, and hackers send website spam for various reasons, including black-hat SEO
techniques, attempting to sell services, or attempting to find vulnerabilities in websites that
help them spam other people. Unfortunately, this is a very common issue in WordPress sites,
since it is the leading blog software.

2. Published spam on a website does not look good. It gives off the appearance that the website
is not managed well (if at all) and that the site is not as reputable as other ones. If you looked
under this blog and saw that there were more comments about other websites that are
completely unrelated like pharmaceuticals and handbags, you would probably assume the
blog is unprofessional, poorly maintained or hacked.
Now, you could easily just go through and delete a spam comment if it is a rare occurrence.
They are irritating but deleting one comment takes just a click inside the WordPress admin.
There are ways to automate the process of cleaning up comment spam or even preventing it.
If comment spam is a reoccurring annoyance, then you might need to take additional steps.
Manual Comment Maintenance
When you do see spammy comments in your WordPress admin, mark them as Spam instead
of just deleting them. This helps to train WordPress and any other spam detecting plugins
that similar comments or comments from those same users are suspicious. You also need to
regularly empty the spam database, using the Empty Spam button, so the comments can be
cleared out and free up your database space.
Adjusting Discussion Settings
Check your settings under Settings > Discussion. This area offers various options to customize
the way that comments are handled in your WordPress site. Several of the options are
selected by default, and they might not be ideal. For example, you may not want to allow
people to post comments on new articles by default, and instead turn on comments for specific
posts. You can always overwrite the settings by editing the options in a single post directly.
You can also require users to be logged in and registered to have the privilege of commenting.
Using Akismet
One way to alleviate WordPress spam problems is by using the Akismet plugin. Akismet
automatically filters out the spam comments on your website or blog, making your life much
easier and your website much cleaner. In order to incorporate Akismet and take advantage of
its spam filtering, you need to order a key code from their website. You can use Akismet on
a personal website for free, and there is a small monthly fee for business websites. Akismet
can also be extended with other plugins to prevent known spamming servers from abusing
your contact forms. There are other plugins available that offer similar spam filtering
protection.
Find more information on http://www.webii.net/blog/2014/08/spammers-bots-
and-your-wordpress-website/