WordPress blogs open to the world can be a magnet to spam, if you are accepting comments on your pages and posts. We’re using a few extremely useful spam plugins to catch spam on our blog server, but here’s a few tips to keep spam to a minimum:
- Have moderation turned on for all comments; you can get an email notifying you when a comment is waiting moderation. Otherwise, spammers can comment on any post or page without your knowing it.
- Turn off comments on any informational pages that don’t require comments, such as a contact page, office hours, etc. You probably have left an email or phone number there for people to contact you, so you don’t need comments about static, non-changing information on these pages.
- You may want to turn off comments on older posts unless the content is relevant or up to date. Spammers like to inject their spam on older unmoderated posts (you are moderating them, yes?). You can choose to do so by going to Settings/Discussion, and choose to close comments after a number of days; the default is set at 30.