How to Identify and Stop Blog Comment Spam

stop_spam_sign

As a follow up to Jonathan Bailey’s great post yesterday, Blogging Pitfalls: Becoming a Spammer, I wanted to talk about comment spam a bit more.  Bloggers are often inundated with comment spam, which can get so bad that they might even reconsider moderating comments.
Unfortunately, there are some forms of comment spam that have gotten out of control over the past year or so, and bloggers need to be aware of these spam tactics, try to identify them, and mark those comments as spam using their comment spam detection tool (for example, Akismet).  Identifying comments as spam helps your spam tool better identify them in the future, so hopefully, they won’t get through to your moderation queue anymore.
But how do you know if a comment is spam if it’s not the usual link-filled or gibberish spam comment that can be identified with a cursory glance?  That’s the problem with…

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