Although Akismet catches most of the spam hitting my blog, I get a lot that read like this ” This is one of the most incredible blogs Ive read in a very lengthy time. The quantity of information in here is stunning, like you practically wrote the book on the subject. Your weblog is fantastic for anyone who wants to comprehend this subject a lot more. Excellent stuff; please maintain it up!”
To me, this is also spam as it’s not really about the blog post I wrote. These are so frequent. How do you handle these? Trash them? If you’re not moderating, they would be allowed through. Are the links in them dangerous? What is your experience and how do you handle? I trash them but sure could use real comments! 

Heh.  There are a ton of those commenters.

They are spammers.  They usually link their pharmaceutical sales site or something else in their name.

I thought I’d address one other thing though. About comments.

The #1 thing most bloggers are disappointed by is the lack of comments by folks, especially in the early days of their blog.  My advice to you is to hang in there.  Here is the reason:

• When you first launch your blog, your regular reading audience is very very small.
  
• A lot of bloggers get disappointed early at the lack of comments, and then stop blogging as often because of the lack of comments.  They feel like they’re shouting into the forest.
• After you have several hundred regular readers, you will start getting comments.

Other things that help:

• Link trade with other sites that talk about the same things.  Establish those relationships.  These people are the most likely to comment on your blog, or read your blog, or link to an interesting post you’ve written.  That nets new audience members.
• Actively search out and follow people on Twitter and Google+ that talk about or use the same hashtags as you.  Engage with them by commenting on their Tweets or status updates.  Non-robotic Twitter users will engage with you.  These people are the most likely to comment on your blog.
• Use Google Adwords or some other keyword research tool to figure out what your target audience is searching for.  Start using these terms liberally in your title tags, backlinks, and inside the body of your blog posts.  People finding you on search represent possible new audience members.

Once you’re up to several thousand unique visitors a month, the comments will start coming in

-Daryll

@michellefontaine If it’s not blatant spam (ie. here’s a link to pharmaceuticals), but just a poorly worded comment that doesn’t fit what I consider acceptable, I just trash it.  If it’s the blatant spam variety, I will actually mark it as spam.  There are some comments where I find it hard to tell when someone is just commenting to spam vs. trying to comment but English is not their first language.  Just in case it is the latter, I don’t want to mark them as spam and get them caught up in the blacklist, but I don’t want to approve them either.  

The other way to tell if a generic sounding comment is spam is to Google the first sentence.  If you see 100′s of other blogs with the same comment coming up in the result, you’ll know.  

Thank you @kristi-hines @michellefontaine I’m really new at blogging and have had many comments you have mentioned and wondered whether it was spam or someone being just nice, so thank you.

One easy way to identify the spam is the horrible grammar of the comment. They will always use totally inappropriate language and their email addresses are a dead give away usually. A while back (and in another thread) we discussed spam and from that thread I found Spam Free Wordpress and it absolutely kills the spam. I have not had but one spam message come through, which I then took care of. That is just a link to their site, not a, what do you call it, affiliate link? Anyway that plugin absolutely worked wonders.

Spam Free plugin seems to be stopping legitimate folks from commenting. Has anyone else run into this? How did you fix it?

Thanks, Eugen.

This week Akismet let through a comment including the word “porno.” I’m reluctant to discourage comments by using Disqus, but the spammers may eventually drive me to it.