Wikipedia tells you that Spam is a brand of precooked canned meat that can be eaten cold as is, reheated, or cooked.
It's a product of the American company Hormel. The brand name will be the origin of the term " spam " for unsolicited email.
Yes, you chose the blogging platform that, at the time I'm writing this, powers 30% of the websites in the world. You didn't really think some clever people wouldn't take advantage of that.
So they take advantage of you by registering on your site with bots. But why? Simple: by posting a comment on one of your articles and inserting a link, spammers attract inattentive visitors and boost their inbound links to crappy sites. To your detriment, because the god Google hates that.
How to avoid it?
Follow my recipe and you'll find out…
Learn how to chase away the nuisances from your table so you don't have to eat Spam!
First of all, know that the next recipe also allows you to activate the Akismet plugin, which I'll show you how to set up here. Indeed, the next Recipe No. 12 will be about JetPack. But since I'll let you decide whether to enable JetPack or not, you can start with this recipe. I must warn you that it's a little more complicated to install this anti-spam tool on its own than with JetPack.
- Install Akismet from the WordPress plugin store
- Create a plan on akismet.com by clicking the first SIGN UP FOR AKISMET NOW button on the homepage
- choose the Get Personal plan by clicking the first button again
- In the right column under Get Personal there is a small black slider that lets you choose the amount you can allocate to this plugin. If you have a budget, enter your card details. Otherwise, slide the control to the left and when it reaches zero a CONTINUE button appears in the left column. Click it.
- You will access your API key (your secret code made of consecutive lowercase letters and numbers) which you copy and paste into the API Key field in your plugin settings in WordPress.
- I also recommend clicking the option "Automatically discard the worst and most common spam so I never see it."
There you go, you can sleep easy — no unwanted comments will appear on your site. Otherwise you'll have the option to mark it as Spam if it's a newcomer. Did you like this recipe? Leave a comment or share it!
