In this article I’m going to talk about why having an excessive amount of spam comments or guestbook entries, can cause resource usage problems on your account.
What are spam comments?
Because your website is open to the whole Internet it’s very common for there to be a section for visitors to leave comments on your website. Unfortunately a lot of times these comment boxes can also allow spammers to fill up your pages with fake comments, trying to either link people back to their own websites, or just being malicious and trying to fill your website up with junk.
You wouldn’t want to allow these spam comments to remain, because not only can it cause your website to run slower over time, but it could also negatively affect your own site’s search engine rankings .
What are guestbook entries?
Guestbooks aren’t as widely used anymore these days and have been primarily replaced with comments and forums. However they have the same general concept where a website visitor can leave a message for the world to see on your website.
Just like comments on your website, guestbook entries can also be used by spammers to post their own spam content on your website. Just like spam comments, spam guestbook entries can also cause your website to slow down, and impact your search engine rank.
Protecting against spam
In order to deal with either type of comment leaving spam issues, it’s generally best recommended to utilize a CAPTCHA plugin for your software, or by manually implementing one yourself. This makes it harder for automated bots to create fake accounts, and can help greatly reduce or even eliminate spam comments.
You can also read my guide on dealing with spam in your posts and comments for a few options on how to help deter spam comments. If you’ve identified some problematic users that keep trying to come back and spam you, you could also block unwanted users from your site using .htaccess.
If you happen to use WordPress and have a lot of comment spam I also have a guide on WordPress comment spam clean up that goes over how to remove spam directly from the WordPress database.
