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Recognize Fake Comments on Your Website

FYI, those sweet-but-slightly-weird comments you get on your blog are fake.

I see these comments on sites all the time and you probably have too but may not have noticed anything particular about them. They look more or less normal. They’re always positive, often enthusiastic even. And who doesn’t like to see that someone out there enjoyed your post so much they felt compelled to respond?

Problem is they are total baloney. They are not genuine reactions to the contents of your post but generic comments that aim solely at driving traffic to the commenter’s website. They don’t even need to include a link in the body of the text as the commenter’s name will be linked. The logic is that at least some readers will click on it and thereby drive traffic to the intended site.

Fake commenting used to be a way to simply accumulate inbound links, which are per se perfectly legitimate tools of SEO. But nowadays almost all blogs add nofollow tags to comment links so that Google ignores them. Backlinks in comments have lost a lot of their SEO appeal. Unlike genuine commenters who can rely on quality content to generate interest (and clicks), spammers have to rely on volume which they achieve thanks to automated comment writing.

How to spot them

There are 3 key giveaways and they all need to be there.

  1. Generic or suspiciously perfect content. Old-school spam comments were easy to spot — vague praise that could apply to any post. AI-generated spam is trickier. It can reference your topic convincingly. But it still tends to feel off: slightly too enthusiastic, too polished, or lacking any real opinion. If a comment reads like a book report rather than a human reaction, be suspicious.

  2. Written by a stranger. Spammers stay anonymous. Acquaintances don’t.

  3. They include a link (or dozens). Either in the body of the text or attached to the name of the commenter or both.

Verifying suspicious comments

Just occasionally you will get a generic comment that will include a link from someone you don’t know and it will be genuine. The only way to recognize those false positives is to check out the website that they link to.

You don’t need to actually click on the link to verify it. Read the domain name first — spammers’ sites often have obvious URLs. In WordPress, hover over the link in the Comments page in your admin to preview where it leads. If it’s a gambling site, a crypto scheme, or a suspiciously generic “digital marketing agency” — it’s spam.

What to do about it

  • Use Akismet or a similar spam filter. It catches the vast majority of spam comments automatically.
  • Moderate comments before they appear on your site. A quick scan is usually enough to separate real comments from spam.
  • Disable comments on old posts. Most spam targets posts that have been around long enough to rank in search engines.
  • Require a name and email. This won’t stop determined spammers but raises the bar slightly.

Or just turn them off

It’s worth asking whether you need blog comments at all. Many sites have disabled them entirely. The conversation has moved to social media — people respond to posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, or X rather than on the post itself. If your comments section generates more spam than genuine discussion, turning it off is a perfectly reasonable choice. One less thing to manage.

If this is all new to you and you do have comments enabled, go take a look at the Comments section in your admin page and run through the list. It will be an eye opener.