Welcome to the Internet Beacon’s blog. My name is Josh. The Internet Beacon is a Search Engine Optimization firm located in Finksburg, MD. SEO is a form of Internet Marketing. In essence, we work with you and your website to increase the likelihood of being found in search engines like Google and Yahoo. For more information, check out our page on SEO Answers and our blog post on SEO. This week I’d like to talk about keeping spammers off of your blog.

A blog is a great way to get your particular message out to people around the world. Whether you are sharing recipes, business strategies, or trading baseball cards, a blog can become a hub of activity. Naturally, there are people drawn to these places to take advantage of the amount of activity. These people are called spammers. You can tell who they are because they don’t usually add to the conversation, but rather promote their own site. Keeping these people off of your blog will go a long way towards building its legitimacy. Here are three ways to do that.

1) CAPTCHA Them.

First, please forgive the play on words. Okay, a CAPTCHA is a tool for many

blogs and other sites which requires the user to enter the text they see in an image that looks slightly garbled of distorted. We’ve all seen them. CAPTCHA is used to prevent automated software from just scanning a website and filling in their information. This is a classic method for spammers. The best part of this is that implementation is free and has very little impact on the end user. It is readily available for WordPress as an add-on called “SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam 2.2.9”. It’s free so go out and grab it if WordPress is powering your blog.

2) Papers Please

Another way to ensure that the comments left on your blog are legitimate is to require users to register themselves. This is an almost surefire way to make sure that comments left are legitimate. The biggest downside here is that many users may not wish… Read the rest