Dealing with comment and form spam in WordPress and other sites, is a daily task for most of us.  But I find that the spammers are getting smarter and sneakier and I want to protect YOU from THEM.  Here’s the why and how to stop spam in WordPress, specifically.

Spam Devalues your Site

When you are searching out the legitimacy of a site, what do you do?  I have a quick look for content that makes sense, I look for ridiculous over-use of keywords and nonsensical links.  If I find a lot of spam comments, or completely un-moderated content, I don’t trust that site. And I will rarely, if ever, return.  The content of our site, and our engagement with our readers is paramount!  Letting spam into your site, is like leaving garbage on the coffee table when you have friends over for tea.

Plus, it is annoying and distracting when comments with **** are in the middle of a discussion on our toddler’s halloween costume. Or worse, there are 40 lines of text about a certain body part’s enlargement.  Downright perturbing!

Spam is bad for your Site’s SEO

By default, WordPress adds a “nofollow” tag to your commenters’ links.  There are plugins that ‘reward commenters’ by turning off the nofollow but that is a bad idea.  Lots of outbound links can ‘bury’ your legitimate and helpful links.  Of course no one knows for certain how Google values links today or how they will tomorrow.  But one thing is for certain – they do their best to DEVALUE spammy links and sites that intentionally promote spam.When you let comment spam slip through your moderation and onto your site, you can significantly hurt your search engine rankings.  You need to recognize spam and get rid of it.  We’ll show you how.

Recognizing Spam in WordPress

The obvious spam – 40 lines on body parts, or 200 links – should be easily caught by WordPress plugins/spam filters and your innocent eyes can be spared.  The problem is that spammers have become connoisseurs at the compliment/argument approach.  How many times have you received an odd comment from Asdf, linked to myspammysite.com that says, “This is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks to you!”?  Of course not everyone whose native tongue is other-than-English is a spammer.  So wiping out all comments due to incorrect grammar isn’t a good idea either.  (I’m sure most of my comments left on your sites wouldn’t make it in that case!)  Things to check:

• website link- is it relevant to comment or owner?
• commenter name – does it look real?
• comment itself – is it relevant?

Approving spammers “comments” is condoning what they’re doing – lets not do that, k?

Getting rid of spam in WordPress

For WordPress webmasters we recommend that you check your settings to prevent spammers from leaving an irrelevant comment to your site.

1.  Under Settings>> Discussion >>Comment Moderation:

Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 2 or more link

Add a spammer’s ip address or url in the Comment Blacklist box field.

2.  When using a comment filtering plugin – be sure to mark the comment as “spam” – do not simply “trash” it.  Your plugins are likely ‘smart’ meaning that they’re learning from your spammed comments and will get better at screening the comments.

3.  Use CAPTCHA if you’re receiving a massive amount of comment spam

WordPress Backup Schedule

You need to backup WordPress as often as it takes to not loose too much data.  We recommend the following schedule based on the frequency of your new content.

If you post content:

• 12 + times per day, backup WordPress database every 3 hours
• 1+ times per day, backup WordPress database once a day
• 2-3 times per week, backup WordPress database once a week

Storing Your WordPress Backups

Since we support so many WordPress websites and themes, we see a lot of problems.   And trust me when I say that no one expects it to happen to them!  So please take my word for it when I recommend keeping one of your WordPress backups off-site.  What I mean, is to keep one of the backups off of your regular server.  If your server account is messed with in any way, and your only backup is ON your server, you could be in trouble.  Many backup plugins provide an option of emailing the backup to you.  This is a great way to keep your backups on your computer instead of on your server.

WordPress Backups Include TWO Parts

1.  Database

You need to be sure that your database is backed up.   The database is where all your content is stored – all your pages, posts, sidebar widget content and settings.  A database back up will end in .sql or .sql.zip or something similar.  (SQL is the extension of a database file) WP DB-Manager does this very well.

2.  Files

The files include all your software like WordPress, Themes and Plugins.  The images that you use in your media uploader, are also stored in the Files area.

Usually, the WordPress files are located in your home/public_html directory.  And it can require the use of FTP.  If that makes your eyes glaze over, there are some plugins that can accomplish this for you – like this WP Complete Backup plugin – but the only one that I’ve used and attest to is Backup Buddy(premium plugin).

Prevent Useless WordPress Backups

Any backup will be completely and utterly useless if it is corrupted or BLANK!  So please, please, please be sure to test it.  For both backup-buddy, and for Wp-Db-Manager, simply go to the list of backups, and check that they are not 0 mb.  Zero would be NO DATA.  You’ll need to troubleshoot that and make sure you get proper backups.

And of course, if you’d rather just have us look after it for you – purchase a one-month retainer to get a backup, upgrade, speed test, and more!

Credit: crunchmeme

The much anticipated release of WordPress 3.1 happened this morning.  Although I was excited to see some more geekery what I’m pleased as punch with, is the pretty blue admin theme.  More on that below!

Here’s a few things you may be interested in – and how to get around them:

In new blogs, the edit post screen will be more streamlined.  This means the extra boxes will be hidden.

To add, remove, or edit the number of viewable boxes, click on the “Screen Options” tab at the top of the screen.

As I mentioned above, a refreshed blue admin theme is available.  If you don’t already use the blue admin theme, I recommend checking it out.  Nothing on the outside of the blog is affected.

You can change the theme you use in Users>>Your Profile subtab.

A handy feature that 99% of us will use is the new linking feature.  You can now, easily add a link to another post within your site.

To do so, highlight the text that you’d like to link, and click the chain link icon.  Instead of completing the linking field, click on the “Or link to existing content”. A suggestion box will open with content that may be related to your current topic.  Or you can search for a more appropriate post/page within your site to link to.

Some of the more geekier changes include custom format support for posts, more flexibility with custom queries, taxonomies and the related breadcrumbs.   To view all the geeky details see this page:  http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1

If you’d like a full backup and upgrade, email us at support@desperatelyseekingwp.com and we’ll be happy to help.

How to Backup & Upgrade:

1. Check your DBManager or Automatic Backup plugin to be sure you have a recent backup of the database. 

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2. Go to your cpanel or web  host and get a backup of the files in your public_html directory (usually with a click of your mouse).
3. Go to the plugins screen, select the “active” button at the top.  Select all plugins.  Click on “bulk actions” drop down and select “Deactivate”.
4. Go to Tools, upgrade.  And click the button!
5. While you’re there, you might as well select all the plugins in the list (if any) and click on “upgrade all”.
6. Go back to plugins, click on “recently active”.  Select all plugins, click on “bulk actions” drop down and select, “activate”.
7. Thats all there is to it!

Wondering why there’s been all these important security releases lately?

Lorelle posted an excellent answer here: http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/update-wordpress-now-wordpress-3-0-4/

Want us to take care of upgrades for you?

Purchase the Retainer Service for immediate upgrades, monthly reports, and more.