Alicia Lyttle & Lorette Lyttle of Monetized Marketing - Cleaning Up and

Eliminating SpamSo, here are some tips to clean up the spam and then stop it in its tracks…

1 – Cleaning Up Comments

When you log into your WordPress Dashboard do you see a large number of pending comments like this screenshot – 342 pending comments yikes!

Unfortunately, most of the time majority of the comments are spam. Here is a quick tip to clean that up….

Click on Comments and on the top right of the screen you will see where it says “Screen Options”, click on that.

2 – Preventing Spam Comments

Akismet - Visit Plugin Page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/) Every new install of WordPress comes pre-loaded with some plugins, and one of them is Akismet – which is a great plugin to protect your site from spam. What Akismet does is that it checks every comment that is posted on your blog, then it sends the comment to the spam box if it seems like spam or has been already marked as spam by any other blog owners. In order for Akismet to work, you will need an API key (https://akismet.com/signup/) . This is free for personal use and affordable for non-personal use.

Where it says “Show on Screen”, change to something high, like 999 and all of the comments will be listed on the page.

Then simply do a Bulk Action and delete the list of comments.

If for some reason that doesn’t work for you, there is a great plugin that makes it easy, Bulk Comment Remove (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bulk-comment-remove/)

Alicia Lyttle & Lorette Lyttle of Monetized Marketing -

Bad Behavior – Visit Plugin Page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bad-behavior/) This is a great plugin that not only stops spammers from posting on your blog but it can also block them from even visiting your blog. This is one that can be used in addition to any of the other spam plugins.

There are many more spam plugins that are out there, this is just a pick of 3 of some of the most popular. What plugin are you using to prevent spam on your blogs?

Alicia Lyttle & Lorette Lyttle of Monetized Marketing -

WP-Hashcash – Visit Plugin Page (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/) This is an anti-spam plugin that works on getting rid of spam and sending the spam to the Akismet section. Next step is to verify if the visitor is a person or simply a robot or automated system. This plugin claims to be 100% effective at blocking all spam and no real comments. Also blocks most pingback & trackback spam.