One of the more annoying, time wasting and frustrating aspects of the internet is SPAM. It can not only infiltrate your email Inbox but it can also affect your brand new WordPress blog or website. Don’t worry about it though – there is plenty you can do about it.

SPAM can appear in all sorts of incarnations. It is fairly easy to spot and it won’t take you long to work out what the real comments, pingback and trackbacks are versus down and out SPAM.

One of the more common types of SPAM is comment SPAM. Because you essentially have an open gateway to your blog when you have the commenting feature activated, unscrupulous spammers (as they are known) will try and use it for evil instead of good. I think we’ve all seen what I’m talking about, messages and links that are related to drugs, sexual or adult content, scams and ripoffs.

Here is an example of the type of thing you can expect to see:
This first example is someone trying to sell the drug cialis.

This next example is typical of the mindless rubbish that you will be exposed too:

If you actually bothered to click on the links you would find you’d be directed to some Russian site that is trying to push everything from pirated movies to illegal immigration to just blatant volumes of absolutely nothing just to waste your time.

Once again it is fairly easy to spot. Take a look at the website URL, hardly typical of your friendly trusted site. You can also check out the email address. Spammers will not use a personal email address, they will generally use a free service such as a hotmail, gmail, yahoo or one of hundreds of other free services. This way they are harder to track as they require little to no real details to set up these accounts. If they do happen to be shut down or have their account suspended they simply fire up another account under another name. A real scourge and a real pain.

It is not a matter of ‘if’ you will receive SPAM, it is a matter of ‘when’. It is going to happen so we are going to get you prepared.

Now, WordPress does offer an anti-spam feature called AKISMET and it is one of the default plugins in the WordPress installation. You need a special key generated over at www.wordpress.com to activate AKISMET and this process can be a little bit of a pain. We won’t put you through the ringer because there is an easier and faster way to protect your site from unwanted spam.

On all of our WordPress installations we use a plugin called WP-SpamFree Anti Spam. It is free and can be downloaded using the Add New plugin menu on the sidebar.

Enter the word “spam” into the search box and click on Search Plugins. WordPress will return several pages of results. Scroll down until you find the WP-SpamFree Anti Spam plugin.

This is what you are looking for:

Simply click on Install and it will automatically do the rest.  Here is WP-SpamFree installed in your plugins list.

WP-SpamFree is configured to work straight out of the box without any changes to the settings. However, if you want to have a look at what you can configure feel free to click on the Settings link and take a look.

Here is the WP-SpamFree Anti Spam plugin at work. Here you can see that the plugin has blocked 314 spam comments.

We would recommend that you still mediate all your comments and not let comments appear automatically on your blog or website until you have approved them. As outlined in eProfit Formula – make sure you have the right settings ticked in the Settings – Discussion menu.

With WP-SpamFree firmly in place, you can get on with generating good content instead of sifting through the SPAM and wasting valuable time and energy.