Comment on WordPress Theme SEO by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Advanced Options Akismet WordPress Plugin (free) is the most popular WordPress comment SPAM plugin and works quite well. I own a WordPress site with over 25,000 comments and have turned on ‘automatic’ comments (comments aren’t held for moderation as long as they don’t have two URLs in the body of the comment) and Akismet filters at least 99% of comment SPAM.

Yesterday was checking comments on that site (check that site every couple of weeks) and Akismet had filtered over 1,000 spam comments since my last check, checking through what had passed Akismet found a couple of SPAM comments that got through which I manually marked as SPAM (I understand Akismet learns from us marking SPAM as SPAM).

Stallion has built in comment link features under the Stallion Advanced SEO options page section “Links and Comments”.

The site I mentioned above has author URLs disabled (via Stallion : authors can’t add an author URL and Stallion doesn’t show an author URL, also comment body links with format htt://www.example.com are not converted to clickable links) and it makes little difference to the automated SPAM that’s posted by SPAMMERS using SPAMBOTS since it’s automated (doesn’t cost them much time to add your sites URL to their SPAMBOTS list of blogs to SPAM).

Stallion also protects your site from wasting link benefit via author URLS and in the case of SPAMMERS author links that can get your site a penalty. If you have author links turned on in Stallion (like I have on this site) your commenter’s can add author links, but they are invisible to Google etc… Your visitors can click the links and so you can reward your commenter’s with click through traffic, but there is no SEO damage to your site and no SEO benefit to your commenter’s sites (no link benefit is passed or lost : with all other WordPress themes I’ve seen comment author URLS have nofollow added to them and this deletes link benefit!!!).

For most sites I use Akismet, allow author links to be added and shown and have WordPress set to moderate all new commenter’s first comments. When I approve a commenter’s first comment all future comments are approved automatically. This is a really good setup for an important site you put time into and want good comment SPAM protection.

David