Most of us are familiar with Spam emails clogging up our in-box or Spam texts and calls to our phones, but were you aware that Spam could be hitting your website too? Spammers are the vermin of the Internet – unwanted visitors who frustrate and spoil it for everyone else. Yet, we don’t have to live with it as there are simple solutions to prevent website spam.
There’s three main ways that you could be suffering from web Spam and there are simple measures that can help protect your website from these mischief makers.
1. Spam comments
If you have any sort of comment or contact form on your site you will receive spam messages. In my experience most are trying to sell counterfeit goods, but others are quite amusing in their language and content and much of it doesn’t make sense. If you don’t filter the publishing of these comments your blog or site will be playing host to the spammers and their nonsense or links to shady websites.
How to avoid spam comments
Fistly, make sure you have a CAPTCHA entry as one of the mandatory fields in your comments or contact form. CAPTCHA tools show an image or sum and asks the user has to type the answer into a field. This is a good way of ensuring that only humans can complete your forms, not ‘bots’. For some alternatives to CAPTCHA check out this e-consultancy post.
Secondly, ensure you never allow un-moderated comments on your blog or site. Nothing should be published without human eyes verifying it as a genuine comment. If you are using a publishing platform like WordPress you can use Akismet to filter comments as well.
2. Spam posts, pages or code
Spammers will find ways to use your site or hosting to publish their content, whether that be temporary posts using your domain, hidden pages or hidden code on your page. One client I worked with had a string of undesirable site links hidden within their home page code which I spotted when I audited their site for them. The impact of this on your site’s ranking in search engines can’t be over-stated. Google for instance will question your site’s authenticity and potentially black-list it if it thinks your site is a vehicle for undesirable content, even if you had no awareness of this.
How to avoid spam posts, pages or code
The security of your site’s hosting is the key issue here, and as a site owner you need to take responsibility for this. If your security is not sufficiently stringent then spammers will find a way in to leave their nasty stuff on your domain or server. For smaller businesses using third party hosting you should contact your provider to find out what they can do as additional measures, but also ensure you regularly change passwords to your admin panel and/or CMS, and add in an additional layer of security such as CAPTCHA before anything can be posted to your site.
3. Spam visits to your website
Spam visits are when automated visits are made to your site by another domain. These aren’t genuine people visiting your site, and as such are worthless visits. Whilst this type of spam isn’t public facing it can play havoc with your site stats and analytics. This site for instance is frequently visited by a spam bot, which is then reflected in my web stats and can render the remaining insight from Analytics worthless. If the volume of spam visits increases it can have an impact on your server load, which could result in slower load times for your genuine site visitors. (There is some debate over whether these are actual visits or just ‘ghost visits’ that are trying to trick Google Analytics into reporting more visits, but that is more detail than I want to go into here).
How to avoid spam visits to your site
In Google Analytics you can filter these spam sites out of your data by setting up a new ‘view’ and also by selecting the ‘bot filtering’ option within Admin/View Settings. This will stop Google Analytics from reporting the spam visits but won’t stop the visits themselves.
To block any actual visits to your site from domains you don’t believe are real you will need to block those specific domains from accessing your site. There’s some great instructions on how to do this great article, so I won’t go into detail of how to do that myself.
Conclusion – how to prevent website spam
I hope these tips help you avoid spam on your website. Unfortunately spammers are continually innovating, so it is not enough to put additional site security in place and think ‘job done’. If you think your site is falling victim to spam and you need some help just get in touch.