One of the latest features of reCaptcha protects your website but has a new option that does not make it difficult for real visitors to login and do normal site activity. Which better reflects its catchphrase, “Easy on humans, hard on bots.”

Today, I will demonstrate how to add Google’s Invisible reCaptcha to WordPress using the Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress plugin.

What is reCaptcha?

ReCaptcha is a widely used anti-spam tool that tasks visitors with answering a question. The term CAPTCHA is actually an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

It is important to realize that reCaptcha is different from CAPTCHA. While both accomplish the same result, they have different methods of doing it.

In many cases, reCaptcha will simply require a visitor to type the letters and numbers seen in a graphic or to select all of the street signs in an image. There are also audio options to help visitors that are having trouble. They are simple, but it is something that a spambot cannot do.

If your goal is to stop spam, reCaptcha is exactly what you are looking for.

Why Use Invisible reCaptcha?

As most website owners are aware, spambots are a serious problem for websites of any size. To prevent this, there are multiple plugins and tools you can use to protect your website. But none are as prominent or widely used as Google’s reCaptcha.

It protects millions of websites every day by asking simple questions to confirm if visitors are a bot or not. However, that is changing with the new feature dubbed “invisible” reCaptcha.

What makes this unique is instead of always having to click a box to confirm you are human, you don’t have to.

Now I know what your thinking, how does that protect your website any better?

Essentially, Google can identify suspicious behavior and only the most suspicious behavior will be asked to check a box or fill out a traditional reCaptcha challenge, based on your selection. This means that real visitors should not be impacted while stopping bots.

Installing Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress

The Invisible ReCaptcha for WordPress plugin makes it easy to add this powerful anti-spam tool to your website. It is compatible with a wide array of other plugins like WooCommerce, bbPress, Contact Form 7, and many more.

Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate it for use.

Getting A Site Key for Invisible reCaptcha

On the left-hand admin panel, click on Settings and select the Invisible reCaptcha option. This will pull up the main settings page.

Here is where you can set up your reCaptcha account. You will need what Google refers to as an API Key Pair. This includes a site key and a secret key. Luckily, this is a pretty simple and straightforward process.

First, go to the reCaptcha admin website. You will be prompted to login if you are not already. Once in, click on the “+” option to create a new API key pair.

This is where you can select your version of reCaptcha, enter your domain name (i.e your website), and accept the terms and conditions.

Now you may be inclined to select the latest version of reCaptcha, v3, but you do not want to.

ReCaptcha v3 is not an upgraded version of v2 and is a unique tool. Instead of asking challenges, it assigns every visitor a score that you can use to analyze the traffic your website receives and does not impact the visitor. It is meant to be used in conjunction with other anti-spam tools.

Instead, you want to select reCaptcha v2 and select the Invisible reCaptcha Badge option underneath it.

Next, enter your domain name. Make sure to enter the URL correctly. Otherwise, the plugin won’t work correctly.

Make sure the email under the Owners section is correct and check the box to accept the terms and conditions. Click on the “Submit” button to finish.

Your Site Key and Secret Key will now be generated.

Copy the keys and paste them back into the appropriate boxes in WordPress.

You can also select the language (I recommend automatically detect), the badge position and any custom CSS for the badge itself. Click on the “Save Changes” button when you are finished.

Setting Where reCaptcha Appears

Now that you have your site key in place, it is time to decide where the reCaptcha will appear. As I said earlier, the plugin is fully compatible with multiple plugins. Each plugin has its own settings that you can configure.

Click on the WordPress option.

You have four main options to choose from. Simply check the box of each option you want reCaptcha to appear on. Do this for every plugin you that is compatible with the plugin. Some of the plugins may require a plugin key to work correctly, so make sure the necessary information is added.

Click on the “Save Changes” button when you are done.

The reCaptcha will now be visible where you have enabled it. Visit your website to see it in action. The badge will appear in the position you selected. In my case, it was in the bottom right.

Congratulations on setting up the Invisible reCaptcha for WordPress plugin. Your website should now be protected against spambots without impacting real visitors.

Consider Using Akismet Anti-Spam

If you find that spam is still slipping through while using reCaptcha, I highly recommend using the Akismet Anti-Spam plugin. It was built specifically to prevent spam in WordPress and has a host of other features to help in the fight against spammers.

These include comment spam protection, clear and detailed information on what has been blocked, contact form protection, compatibility with other major WordPress plugins, and much more. It is one of the first plugins every website should install

With over 5 million active installs, it is one of the most popular WordPress plugins available, which is a great testament to its effectiveness. The best part is that it is completely free to use.

Easily Prevent Spam

It may seem like a daunting task at first, but preventing spam is actually not hard in WordPress. There are a number of anti-spam tools and plugins available to help you out.

Although it is important to understand that many of these tools and plugins tend to be an all-in-one package. Many of them are not compatible with one another, so make sure you are only using one anti-spam tool unless stated otherwise by the developers.

What anti-spam tools do you use to keep your website spam free? Have you noticed a reduction in spam since adding Invisible reCaptcha to your website?

The post How to Add Google Invisible Recaptcha to WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Websites that do not realize that they have a lot of spam registration may think about expanding. Expanding under a false notion of growth could have serious financial consequences. For this reason, it is important to prevent spam registration on WordPress membership sites,

Today, I will demonstrate how to prevent spam registration in WordPress membership sites by using the Stop Spammers plugin.

Why Prevent Spam Bots From Registering on Membership Sites

The main reason it is so important to block spam registrations is that they give you false website statistics.

Imagine you see a 20% increase in new accounts registered. You probably are on the verge of a heart attack and are rushing to make plans to expand your operations, but what you should be doing is checking if they are spambots.

Spam in WordPress is never a good thing and there are always ways to prevent it. Unfortunately, a lot of these ways tend to impact users in small ways.

For example, one of the best spam blockers is CAPTCHA, however, this also affects users. It may seem insignificant to ask your registered users to have to enter a few letters, solve a math problem, or select some pictures, but all this takes time and nobody wants to waste time.

Another concern is that these spambots may begin flooding your comment section or forums with incoherent words, advertisements, or profanity. This can ruin the experience for real members that are expecting a better experience.

Luckily, blocking spambots is not that hard.

How to Prevent Spam Bots From Registering in WordPress Membership Sites

Step 1: Install Stop Spammers

The Stop Spammers plugin is extremely easy to use and utilizes powerful spam prevention techniques to guard your website. The tool even provides options to block entire counties from accessing your website.

It is fully compatible with Akismet and works in conjunction with it. All you will need to do is install it and select what the plugin will do with a few easy selections.

Note: Before you begin, it is important to note that this plugin is not compatible with the Jetpack Protect feature. You will need to deactivate Jetpack Protect or the plugin will not work, but the rest of Jetpack is compatible.

Begin by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for Stop Spammers in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the Stop Spammers plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

Step 2: Configure the Settings

This plugin has a lot of customization options to choose from. The default option will most likely be enough for your website, but you can definitely fine-tune what the plugin does and doesn’t do to block spam. This is all done within the plugin’s settings.

On the left-hand admin panel click on Stop Spammers and select the Protection Options option. This will pull up the main settings page. If you did not disable Jetpack Protect, you would see a message indicating that you must disable it to use the plugin.

The settings consist of a list of sliders that you can use to either enable or disable a feature. While the default settings will work well for most websites, you are free to change them. However, since we are dealing with a membership site, make sure to enable the Members-only Mode.

This setting will require users to be logged in to view the website. You may also want to enable the Form Checking option if you use custom form types.

Go through this page and read what each setting does and select which ones you want to use.

If at any point while reading the descriptions, you’re not quite sure what it does, I’d recommend not changing the default settings.

Step 3: Block Countries Access

At the bottom of the page, you will see a Block Countries section.

This is a very powerful tool for websites that know exactly what regions they want to do business with. You can block websites that you are not planning on doing business in and this will prevent all spam bots from that country from accessing your website.

For example, after the United States, Russia, Vietnam, and China are the biggest spam producers in the world. It may be a good idea to block those countries if your website does not apply to them.

However, you are cutting off an entire country from your website, so make sure you are positive before doing it.

Once you have reviewed all of the settings and made your changes, click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

Congratulations, you have successfully configured the Stop Spammers plugin for your website. You can change these settings at any time by visiting this page again.

Other Ways to Stop Spam Bots from Registering

As you might have guessed, the Stop Spammers plugin is just one of many ways to stop spam bots from registering. Let me provide a few alternatives you may consider using.

Remove the Registration Form From WordPress

While there are certain websites like online stores or membership websites that will require users to register on their site, does a simple blog or business site need to? And the answer is a pretty hard no in most cases.

The good news is that this is extremely easy to achieve. All you need to do is visit the General Settings section of WordPress and uncheck the “Anyone can register” box. That will completely eliminate the ability for bots (or anyone) from registering on your site.

Add Email Verification To Your Website

Have you ever wondered why so many websites force you to verify your email address? That’s because most spambots are not able to perform the verification process, thus they can’t actually access your site.

That said, they can still spam your forms. To enable this feature, you can use a plugin like Email Verification/SMS Verification/OTP Verification. Once set up, this plugin will give you the ability to enable user verifications via email, SMS, or OTP.

Of course, this type of feature also has benefits outside of security. In some cases, users really do end up typing in the wrong email address, or other pieces of information.

Forcing them to verify credentials is just a good practice in general.

Include CAPTCHA In Your Registration Form

While many users may find CAPTCHA very annoying, there is no denying that it is highly effective at preventing bots from submitting registration forms. And that’s exactly why nearly every major website uses CAPTCHA to some capacity.

In many cases, your form builder plugin will actually have a CAPTCHA option built-in. So will most anti-spam tools in general.

If not, you can install a plugin like Really Simple CAPTCHA. As the name suggests, it’s very easy to use.

It supports a variety of CAPTCHA patterns that you can select. That way, you can try to make it less annoying for your actual visitors to fill out.

After all, I’m sure all of us have struggled to complete a CAPTCHA in the past.

Avoid Installing Multiple Anti-spam Tools

One of the biggest mistakes a new developer makes is trying to install multiple anti-spam or security plugins at once.

It makes sense right, install more spam prevention plugins and less spam will be able to get through, right? In many cases, these plugins are not compatible with each other. There are exceptions to this rule, but this can actually cause all protection to stop.

Thus, your website will get flooded with spambots.

Another reason to not do this is that anti-spam and security plugins generally use a lot of resources. Having too many resource-intensive plugins active at once can make your website perform sluggishly. This can seriously impact your SEO rankings.

It will also ruin the user experience, that is, assuming they don’t leave the page if it takes too long to load.

Even if they are compatible and somehow do not use a lot of resources, there is also one more factor to consider. The user experience. These plugins typically affect the average user in some way. This can be in the form of a CAPTCHA, limited login attempts, and other things.

These can all be very annoying to users and drive them away.

Prevent Spam Bots from Registering Today

Many new web developers do not take spam seriously enough. Spambots can take over your email subscriptions, comment sections, and registrations. These will give you a false sense of the traffic on your website and eventually your website will be full of spam.

More importantly, they will ruin the experience for real visitors. Spam does not benefit your website at all and you need to make sure you take the proper measures to guard against spam.

One of the best options is to use the Akismet plugin. It is the most popular spam blocking plugin with over 5 million active installs. It is fully compatible with the Stop Spammers plugin, so don’t be afraid to use both. Keep your website spam-free.

How easy do you find the plugin to use? Have you noticed a significant reduction in spam registrations on your website?

The post How to Prevent Spam Bots From Registering in WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Trying to maintain a spam-free comments section manually would require a 24/7 staff. The best way to deal with spam in WordPress is to use any of the powerful antispam plugins available.

Of course, another alternative would be to simply disable the comments section, but that can do more harm than good.

Today, I will demonstrate how to block spam comments with the Antispam Bee plugin in WordPress.

The Importance of the Comment Section

The comment section’s main purpose is for visitors to share their opinions and feedback on content. This helps writers improve and lets the readers know you are listening. Sadly, the Internet is not the nicest place in the world.

Many comments are full of terrible things and offer no criticism or relevance to the content they are written on. Your moderators need to handle these because they make your content and community look bad.

The comments left by spambots can also greatly disrupt your comments section. These can range from advertisements for products or other websites all the way to political messages. If left unchecked, this is all you would see in a comments section.

This means that all of the real comments will be lost beneath all of the spam and that is not good for visitors or for you. To prevent this, you are going to need to protect your comment section from spam.

How to Block Spam Comments With Antispam Bee in WordPress

The Antispam Bee plugin is very popular with over 500,000 active installs and for good reason. It has plenty of customization options to deal with spam comments in a plethora of ways.  For example, you can block comments that are in certain languages.

There are plenty of filters like this, so you can really customize your website the way you want.

Note: Make sure to only have one anti-spam plugin on your website. The vast majority of these plugins do not work with each other. In most cases, they interfere with each other.

Installing Antispam Bee

Begin by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for Antispam Bee in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the Antispam Bee plugin and click on the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

On the left-hand admin panel click on Settings and select the Antispam Bee option. This will pull up the main settings page.

Using Antispam Bee

When first entering the main settings page, you will notice a large number of options to edit. The plugin breaks its options into three columns which include the Antispam Filter, Advanced, and More. Each one of these has a unique purpose that can help your website.

The default options in this plugin will meet most website’s needs, and you may not feel the need to change too much. However,  I will go through each of the options to give you a better understanding of what each one entails.

Antispam Filter

This is the place where all of the magic happens: blocking spam. The default options will cover most of the bases and fix any website’s spam problems without changing anything.

Trust Approved Comments: This option is on by default. Once a user has been recognized as trustworthy, their comments will be automatically approved. This speeds up how fast comments will appear on your website.

Trust Commenters with a Gravatar: This option is off by default. It is quite similar to the last option but will remember the Gravatar image instead of the name. If you do not use Gravatars, then I would recommend leaving this off.

Consider the Comment Time: This option is off by default. This option will look at the time a comment was posted and use that as a factor in determining if it is spam. The plugin does not recommend it when using page caching.

BBCode is Spam: This option is on by default. The majority of spam includes Bulletin Board Code (BBCode), this blocks it completely.

Use Regular Expressions: This option is on by default. The plugin will analyze the comment and determine if it uses a particular speech pattern that most spambots use. If it finds similarities, the comment will be blocked.

Look in the Local Spam Database: This option is on by default. This will use any spam data you have collected in your database and use it to find spam more accurately on your website.

Block or Allow Comments From Specific Countries: This option is off by default. You can use this to block users from specific countries from leaving comments.

Allow Comments Only in Certain Language: This option is off by default. As the name suggests, you can have a comment marked as spam if it is in a certain language.

Advanced

The Advanced options will help you manage how the spam you detect is handled. This section will help save you hours of time you would spend manually sorting spam.

Mark as Spam, Do Not Delete: This option is on by default. All spam detected on your website will be kept and you will have to manually delete it later. This will allow you to make sure the plugin is catching spam and not loyal visitors.

Keep in mind that if you do choose to disable this option, the rest of the options in this section will not be available.

Spam-Notification by Email: This option is off by default. If this option is on it will alert admin accounts that spam is being detected by email. If you have a high amount of spam, your emails could get spammed by the plugin. I would recommend keeping this option off.

Do Not Save the Spam Reason: This option is off by default. This option will not save the reason the comment was marked as spam. This includes information like comment time, links and more.

Delete Existing Spam After X Days: This option is off by default. You can set a number of days. Once that number of days passes, the deletion will begin. This will help you manage the spam you block.

Limit Approval to Comments/Pings: This option is off by default. This will either approve comments based on the comments or trackbacks.

Delete Comments by Spam Reasons: This option is off by default. This option allows you to select the reasons why spam will be deleted by the plugin.

More

This column will help you track everything spam related. This will give you statistics showing exactly what the plugin does to help your website

Generate Statistics as a Dashboard Widget: This option is off by default. This option will show you all of the plugin’s statistics as a dashboard widget. It’s a great way to view all of the information.

Spam Counter on the Dashboard: This option is off by default. This is very similar to the last option, but it will only show a spam counter.

Do Not Check Trackbacks/Pingbacks: This option is off by default. This option will ignore all pingbacks and trackbacks.

Comment Form Used Outside of Posts: This option is off by default. This option will track all of the comments on your archives page. This is a pretty handy option if those pages get a lot of attention.

Keep Your Website Spam-Free

Guarding your website’s comments section is essential to helping your community grow.  Spam comments move real comments to the bottom and ruin any form of discussion. A busy comment section in which the authors regularly reply are a great way to build a community.

Always support options that let visitors give you feedback and interact with each other. And letting Antispam Bee do its thing helps keep the clutter at bay.

What settings block the most spam comments on your website? Do you find the plugin easy to use?

The post How to Block Spam Comments With Antispam Bee in WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Deleting spam comments helps the real comments shine, and creates a better environment for real visitors. Therefore, if you want an active comment section, this is an essential part of the process.

Today, I will demonstrate how to delete spam in bulk with the WP Bulk Delete plugin.

Why Does Deleting Spam Matter?

If left unchecked, spam will destroy your comment section to the point that you won’t be able to find a real comment.

Even with some of the best tools and vigilance, spam comments will slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, when all you see are ads in the comments, visitors don’t bother leaving a comment. And that means you are missing valuable feedback.

And more importantly, the opportunity to interact with your community.

Having an active comment section is a great way to build up a loyal set of followers. In fact, it’s not uncommon for some users to continuously come back to the site just to reply to other comments.

Of course, this is just one aspect of it. Did you ever consider where all that spam is actually stored? Well, it would be on your web server, which means it is taking up valuable space that you pay for.

Thus, if you find yourself low on resources, uncluttering your spam might be the best solution available.

So let’s cover how to actually clear spam messages from your comment section.

How to Delete Spam With WP Bulk Delete

Step 1: Install WP Bulk Delete

WP Bulk Delete does exactly what the name implies. While the focus here is on deleting spam comments, you can also use this plugin to bulk delete posts, pages, users, taxonomies, and metadata.

It’s a valuable tool that has a place on just about any website. More importantly, the plugin is very easy to use. In fact, it will really just take a minute to clear out the spam comments.

Let’s start by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for WP Bulk Delete in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the WP Bulk Delete plugin, click on the “Install Now” button, and activate the plugin for use.

Step 2: Locate the Plugin Settings

With the plugin installed, you will find a new WP Bulk Delete option on your left-hand admin panel. If you click on it, you will see several options for deleting various pieces of content or elements in WordPress.

For the purpose of this tutorial, click on the Delete Comments option.

Note: Some of the features are locked behind the Pro version. If you cannot access a particular option, it is for this reason.

Step 3: Delete Spam Comments

I said this plugin was easy to use, and I meant it. All you actually need to do is check the box for Spam Comments.

Take note of the warning at the top of the screen. The plugin recommends creating a backup before deleting anything. Since you are just deleting spam, it is not essential.

But if you use the plugin for deleting anything else, you should create a backup.

There are some customization options available, but again, were deleting spam, so there not very useful. But just to be thorough, you can delete the comments based on the date they were submitted.

This is really more for the other comment options, so you can pretty much ignore it.

All that’s left is to click on the “Delete Comments” button at the bottom.

A small pop-up will appear asking if you are sure. Click on “Ok” and all of the spam comments will be deleted.

And that’s it. Congratulations! Remember the plugin has a lot of bulk actions available, so be sure to check out the other tools as well. You might find them useful down the road.

Why Not Just Use the Built-In WordPress Comment System?

So the WordPress comment system does actually support bulk actions, however, it is in a limited capacity.

You see the comment section uses pagination, which means it breaks up the comments into pages. Thus, you can only select up to 30 comments at a time. For smaller websites, this is more than enough.

However, for larger websites that might receive hundreds of comments a day, this just doesn’t cut it. Therefore, a plugin that can actually bulk select all of the spam is ideal.

It’s also worth pointing out that if you use another comment system in WordPress, it may already have a bulk option.

Other Plugins to Block and Delete Spam With

While the WP Bulk Delete plugin is terrific, it doesn’t actually help you block spam from getting on your website in the first place. Instead, you should have a dedicated spam plugin installed.

The good news is that WordPress is home to a ton of free-quality anti-spam tools. Here are some of the best ones to try:

Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet is among some of the most popular plugins in all of WordPress. It’s frequently on the Featured screen and often comes with bulk installs of the content management system.

Not only is it one of the best for preventing bad comments, but it has a feature to automatically discard and blocks some of the worst offenders. It’s the go-to anti-spam tool in WordPress, so be sure to give it a try.

Antispam Bee

With more than 700,000 active installs, Antispam Bee is quite a popular plugin. Not only does it analyze user IP addresses for verifying comments, but you can set the spam to delete after a certain number of days.

It can even block entire countries from leaving comments, which is great if you notice most of the spam comes from a specific country. This helps keeps the database free of debris and performing well.

Spam Protection by CleanTalk

The Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk plugin is an excellent all-in-one for unwanted messages. It has one of the highest ratings on the system and supports a myriad of other tools such as WooCommerce and BuddyPress.

It’s worth highlighting that this plugin does not just work for the default WordPress comment section. It also works with other comment system plugins. It prevents spam while automatically deleting it to keep the database clean.

Remove Your Comment Spam Today

As you can see, with the WP Bulk Delete plugin, removing spam is really easy and quick to do. And this is just one of about a hundred plugins that allow you to delete spam comments in WordPress.

By doing this, you are ensuring that your comment section is clear for real people to leave feedback on and interact with one another. More importantly, you can interact with them to strengthen the community bonds.

Thus, you shouldn’t waste another second, delete your spam today. Make your comment section a place to be proud of.

How easy did you find the WP Bulk Delete plugin to use? What anti-spam tool do you use in WordPress?

The post How to Delete Spam Comments in Bulk Using WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.

This has caused many websites to start using multiple trackbacks to try and help them gain traffic. Eventually, this has lead to outright spam which can be very annoying to larger websites. To combat this, many larger websites will turn off all trackbacks and pingbacks on their website.

This will successfully eliminate spam, but you will also lose any of the benefits as well. Today, I will demonstrate how to end trackback spam and mitigate it by using plugins like Akismet.

Trackbacks vs Pingbacks

One cannot talk about trackbacks without talking about pingbacks at the same time. In fact, you will see that disabling one of them disables the other as well. A trackback is generated by copying another website’s trackback URL and using it as a link on their website.

The website will be notified that they are being linked. A pingback happens when a website links to another website. The website that is being linked to will get a notification through their theme. As you can probably already imagine, a very popular website will get hundreds, if not thousands of trackbacks and pingbacks a day.

Spamming these can increase the amount dramatically and there are even bots dedicated to doing this. This is why almost all major websites have this feature disabled.

Why Spam Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

Of course, this raises the question, why would developers go through the trouble of spamming trackbacks and pingbacks in the first place?

Trackbacks and pingbacks are a great way for a smaller or newer website to gain a little traction. By mentioning and linking to very popular content, which will create trackbacks and pingbacks, the website will be able to take advantage of the popularity of those websites.

So by using multiple trackbacks and pingbacks, you are increasing the chances of your website gaining popularity. This creates a mindset that spamming popular content links from a popular website will raise the popularity of the website doing it.

New and struggling websites will use any advantage possible to get noticed and spamming trackbacks and pingbacks became the norm. This happens in almost every industry. Think about movies, video games, television, YouTube, etc.

The moment something becomes extremely popular, the rest of the industry will rush to copy it or put their own spin on it.

How to End Trackback Spam in WordPress

.There are two main ways to deal with trackback spam in WordPress and the method you choose highly depends on your website’s size.

If you are a larger website the benefits from participating in trackbacks and pingbacks are quite small and might actually be more problematic than rewarding while smaller and medium-sized websites will still see benefits that outweigh the spamming.

In these cases, you don’t need a plugin, instead, you can actually just turn the feature off entirely.

Whereas for small and medium-sized websites, pingbacks and trackbacks are useful growth tools to take advantage of. Thus, you want to choose a mitigation option like Akismet.

Method 1: Disabling Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Stopping Trackbacks will also stop pingbacks because WordPress has one on and off switch for both of them. This is a two-step process because you must first turn them off for your new content. Then you must go back to old content and turn them off.

This can be performed in a bulk action, so don’t be afraid if you have a lot of older content.

Step 1: Turn off Notifications

On the left-hand admin panel, click on Settings and select the Discussion option. This is the same location that allows you to change things like comment settings and avatars.

Under the default article settings section, you will see three checkboxes. The first box will alert other websites when other blogs are being linked to your content. You may want to disable this to avoid being the spammer, but they can choose to turn off their own notifications as well.

The second box will turn off all trackback and pingback notifications. Uncheck this box.

This will ensure that any new content you create will not generate any notifications. Obviously, the spam you are experiencing is coming from existing content, thus we still have some work to do.

Step 2: Turn off Pings for Older Content

On the left-hand admin panel, click on Posts and select the All Posts option.

Now it’s time to select all of your articles. Depending on how many you have this can be hard. At the top of the screen, click on Screen Options. Change the Number of items per page to a very large number, like 999 or the number of posts you have. This will display every post on the same page. Click on the checkbox next to Title to select all of your posts.

Under Bulk Actions, select the Edit option. Click the “Apply” button.

On the right side of the page, you will see a Pings drop-down box. Change it to “Do Not Allow” to stop trackback and pingback notifications. Click on the “Update” button to save your work.

Taking these actions will completely eliminate trackbacks and pingback in WordPress. You can also undo these steps at any time if you change your mind.

Method 2: Mitigate Spam with Plugins

Medium and small-sized websites will not face the same amount of spam that larger websites will see. This is because they are less popular. At the same time, it can be quite beneficial to see who is sending trackbacks and pingbacks.

This allows you to return trackbacks and pingbacks and potentially build up beneficial relationships. This can help your website, as well as the other, grow simultaneously. Plugins can help your website mitigate spam and there are a lot to choose from.

Note: Your website should only contain one anti-spam plugin. Many of these tools are incompatible with each other and this also applies to security plugins in general.

1. Akismet

Akismet is one of the most popular plugins in WordPress with over 5 million active installs. In fact, this plugin actually comes pre-installed in WordPress, however, it is not active. Instead, you will have to manually turn it on.

Most websites will use it to block comment spam, but it also blocks trackback spam. It is very easy to set up and no website should run without it.

2. Antispam Bee

Antispam Bee is another popular plugin with over 700,000 active installs that excels at providing websites with protection for both the comment section and WordPress trackback spam. And it can do all of this without having any annoying CAPTCHA present.

Keep in mind that this plugin was designed for the default WordPress comment section. Thus if you are using a plugin to modify or change that system, the plugin will not prevent spam.

3. Topsy Blocker

Topsy Blocker is a great choice and is specifically made to block trackback notifications. This plugin will allow you to select which trackbacks are spam. This is great because you can specifically block websites that are spamming you while keeping real notifications.

Note: This plugin has not been updated in several years. That said, I tested it on May 24th, 2021 and it worked without issue.

4. Spam Protection

Spam Protection is another great general anti-spam tool for WordPress. It’s great at handling spam for WordPress trackbacks, comments, and form registration. It is even compatible with most major form-building plugins like Contact Form 7.

This plugin allows pingbacks without any checks, however, it blocks all trackbacks from users with spam activity. Thus, it will get better over time.

The Benefits of Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Now that you know how to mitigate or completely prevent trackback spam in WordPress, it is important to understand the importance of it.

Getting websites to link back to your website as a source or reference is an amazing opportunity to grow. It’s also a great way to improve your website’s SEO. In fact, many informative websites exist for this exact reason.

Ever notice websites that contain pages with tons of facts, infographics, or statistics?

Yeah, they are fishing for linkbacks and it’s a smart decision. These types of articles are great as references to prove a point or add a wow factor to articles. And as your website becomes more respected, you might even be asked to enter a partnership to promote other websites.

Trust me, new websites are willing to pay for a shoutout or have a link to their website on a popular site. There are a lot of benefits associated with trackbacks and pingbacks, but in many cases, the risk of spam becomes too great for larger websites to participate.

Keep Your Website Spam-Free

Running a website is hard enough without having to worry about spam attacks. The issue with trackback and pingback spam is that sometimes, it is an honest mistake, while other times it is intentional.

Every website at some point will reference or link to another website and that is a good thing. It helps everyone grow and shows that other websites agree or disagree with your point. That said, saying you need anti-spam software in WordPress is an understatement.

Do not think they are optional. You will receive spam in some way no matter what. The Internet is not a kind place and most of these will be intentional. Spam can make you miss other important notifications. Creating an organized work environment is essential to growth.

Have you turned off all trackback and pingback notifications? Which plugin do you use to stay spam-free?

The post How to End Trackback Spam in WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Spam is left by bots programmed to visit a site and leave a generic comment. While sometimes these can be harmless bots that leave random comments, other times, they include links to harmful sites or your direct competition.

CAPTCHA is one of the best ways to guard against spam bots because it requires users to verify they are human. As such, the spam bots are unable to pass these kinds of tests, thus CAPTCHA is one of the most widely used tools to block spam.

Today, I will demonstrate how to use the WP Advanced Math Captcha plugin to combat spam in WordPress.

What Is CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart is a system designed to ask for specific inputs that only humans can make before they perform certain actions on a website.

They are commonly used to protect areas where users can input data to prevent spam bots from entering gibberish. Some of the most popular areas to include CAPTCHA on a website include:

• Comment Section
• Forms
• Login Areas

By preventing the spam bots from accessing these areas, you can significantly reduce the amount of spam. That’s not to say that it will eliminate spam entirely, but it will significantly reduce it, which is what this tutorial is aiming for.

The CAPTCHA tests come in a variety of forms, and if you have ever used the internet before, you should already know what they are like. The most popular option is to just have users check a box to verify they are humans.

However, they can get more complicated. For instance, you may be asked to pick out specific images that contain a certain item or solve simple math problems. Naturally, these will annoy regular users so picking the less invasive ones is the best choice.

How to Add CAPTCHA to Your WordPress Website

The WP Advanced Math Captcha is a great plugin for quickly adding CAPTCHA in WordPress. As the name implies it focuses on adding simple mathematic problems that users must solve to prove they are human.

For example, a user may be prompted to enter the solution for “five + one =” or something akin to that. It can be addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. However, you can choose what kind of problems it will make in the settings.

You can also choose to disable the CAPTCHa for specific countries. For example, let’s say the majority of your user base is in the United States, you may want to turn CAPTCHA on for countries like China, where most spam bots come from.

Regardless of how you use the tool, it only takes a few minutes to enable, so let’s begin.

Step 1: Install WP Advanced Math Captcha

Begin by clicking on Plugins and selecting the Add New option on the left-hand admin panel.

Search for WP Advanced Math Captcha in the available search box. This will pull up additional plugins that you may find helpful.

Scroll down until you find the WP Advanced Math Captcha plugin, click the “Install Now” button and activate the plugin for use.

Step 2: Set Up CAPTCHA in WordPress

In terms of setup, there’s not much to this plugin. You simply need to go through the settings and choose how it behaves and where it is active. To do this, click on Settings and select the Math Captcha option.

While it may seem like there are a lot of settings at first glance, that’s not the case. Most of the options are for country blocking, so there is a long list of country names that makes the page look fuller than it is.

The first option is choosing where the plugin will be active. By default, the plugin is active on your registration form, reset password form, and comment form. You can also choose to enable it on the login page.

There are some options for bbPress and Contact Form 7, but you need those particular plugins installed for the options to work. Simply check the boxes where you want the CAPTCHA to appear.

The next option allows you to hide the CAPTCHA options for users who are logged in. This is a smart choice if you already have CAPTCHA enabled in the login area. Next, you need to choose which mathematical operations your questions will consist of.

By default, only addition and subtraction are selected. You can check the box to also enable division and multiplication, or leave them off.

Next, you can choose if you want the questions to consist of numbers (1,2,3, etc.) or words (One, Two, Three, etc.). This is followed by an option to name the Captcha field and choose how long users have to solve the problem.

Lastly, you have a series of options that all deal with blocking spambots. This includes an option to prevent them from using a URL to leave comments, create an IP block list, and choose countries that you can block entirely.

Simply go through these options as you see fit. After this, click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom.

With this done, the plugin should be working on your website. Take a minute and visit your comment section, or anywhere else you activated the plugin, and verify that the Captcha is working properly.

Note: You will need to log out of your admin account to see the CAPTCHA in action.

And with that, you have successfully installed the WP Advanced Math Captcha plugin in WordPress. You can adjust the settings at any time. Be sure to listen to feedback from users, as CAPTCHA can be a point of frustration for many of them.

Other Plugins to Try for WordPress Captcha

Naturally, there are a lot of plugins in WordPress that allow you to add CAPTCHA to your site. This includes non-math-based ones that users may find easier to answer.

Here are some of the best options to consider.

Advanced Google reCAPTCHA

Advanced Google ReCAPTCHA is the most popular CAPTCHA plugin for WordPress. Instead of getting a question you need to solve or use any form of brain power to pass, all this asks is if you are human. If so, click the check box.

The best part of this plugin is that there aren’t many settings to configure. In fact, you can just install the plugin and it will work for most websites with the default options. As such, it is the ideal solution for WordPress.

Really Simple CAPTCHA

If you are focused on preventing spam from entering your Contact Form 7 forms, then the Really Simple CAPTCHA is the perfect plugin for the job. It has over 400,000 active installs and makes the process very simple, as the name implies.

This plugin was specifically made to work with Contact Form 7, thus it does not work without that plugin installed. In this case, the user will be asked to input the letters they see to pass the test when they are about to submit the form.

Captcha Code

CAPTCHA Code is another excellent option for protecting your comment section against spam. This plugin works throughout your site and tasks users with inputting the code they see on their screen.

It works in the comment section, login area, registration area, and other forms in WordPress. It should work upon activation, but you can customize where it works in the settings, thus it is another option that takes a few minutes to set up.

Install A CAPTCHA Plugin in WordPress Today

CAPTCHA has become an important part of protecting your site against spambots. It comes in a variety of forms that test users in different ways so it’s up to you to find the least invasive way to add it in WordPress.

Just be mindful that CAPTCHA can sometimes prevent real users from engaging with your site. For example, the math-based solution we covered here might be too difficult for some users who struggle with math.

As such, it’s important to keep your user base in mind when choosing a CAPTCHA solution.

Has installing a CAPTCHA plugin in WordPress reduced the amount of spam you receive? What kind of CAPTCHA do you use?

The post How to Combat WordPress Comment Spam Using Captcha appeared first on GreenGeeks.

The last thing you want is your email being flagged by major corporations and online filters. For instance, a negative report from services like Spamhaus will prevent any email being sent from your specific domain name. This can be extremely problematic for businesses and organizations that rely on email for communication.

In this tutorial, I’m going to go over the basics of how you can make sure your email messages are not considered spam. Following these rules will greatly reduce your risks of being blacklisted or suffering negative backlash from the online community.

Complying with the CAN-SPAM Act

As long as you’re not trying to abuse email usage, complying with the CAN-SPAM act isn’t all that difficult. In fact, it’s possible the vast majority of you are complying already and don’t even realize it.

What are the basic rules for following the CAN-SPAM act?

1. Refrain From Buying Email Lists

Although email lists are not as prominent as they once were, people often debate buying them to grow their marketing. Unfortunately, it also means you may be buying a list of addresses of people who may not be interested in your product or service.

A lot of mailing lists are created by scraping a website for contact information. It doesn’t matter if the individual is open to solicitation or not. And this is what causes the problem for a lot of people. It’s a quick way to give your brand a reputation as a “spammer.”

It’s always best to create an email list from subscribers at your website. These people are already interested in your content, which means the possibility of interaction is higher and there is greater potential for making money from marketing. In fact, there are a number of ideas that will increase email response rate without buying email lists.

2. Avoid False Identity Information

Cloaking or hiding your message meta data is a poor practice. When you provide false or misleading information regarding your messages, it creates an instance of mistrust. It may also cause filter systems and organizations to flag your email as spam.

Data such as “From” and “To” are elements you need to pay attention to. For example, I never trust or open an email where the “From” line is my own address…unless I sent it to myself on purpose. This is seen as a extremely poor practice to try and circumvent spam filters.

3. Keep Subject Lines Truthful

Use the subject line as it was intended; as a way to inform the recipient what the message is about. Being deceptive in the subject line is a good way to annoy recipients as well as ensure the message is caught in a spam trap.

The subject should be an ultra brief topic of what the email regards. Don’t use it as a way to bait people into opening the message. This will hurt your chances of engaging the reader and forming a bond, which will impact the success of an email marketing campaign.

4. Disclose if the Message is an Ad

If people expect a message to be an ad, they are more likely to treat it as such. This also means they might interact with it on a consumer level. Although the laws are not prohibitive when it comes to identifying the message as an ad, it’s still a good practice.

The best way to comply with CAN-SPAM and reduce annoying your recipients is by clearly defining the message as an ad. I’ve seen many emails full of engaging information that clearly stated it was an advertisement. Many times, I found myself clicking on their links to learn more – after a bit of research to make sure the company is legitimate, that is.

5. Provide Contact Information

Displaying your business’ physical address is a good way to reduce looking spammy. This gives everyone a clear view of how they can contact you for any reason. You’ll see many of the most effective email marketing campaigns include address information as well as a direct contact link.

This provides a sense of legitimacy in the message. It’s information the reader can use to verify if the information is legitimate or not. It also makes you seem more approachable and not some automated bot with a mailing list.

6. Allow Recipients to “Opt-Out”

One of the most important facets of email marketing is making sure recipients can opt-out of future messages. Not everyone is receptive to email marketing, and some may simply change their mind about your content.

When providing an opt-out link, make sure it’s honored. If someone leaves your mailing list and he or she still receives email from you, the person may file a complaint against your domain with spam filtering agencies. The end result is a blacklisted domain.

Plus, it’s incredibly rude to not adhere to opting out. It has potential to damage your online reputation.

7. Pay Close Attention to Domain Email

Keep an eye on what messages are sent form your domain. You may be practicing good etiquette for email, but that doesn’t mean your staff is. You want to make sure everyone using your domain to send messages is doing so according to the CAN-SPAM act.

Users are not the only ones who can take advantage of your domain, either. Some malware is capable of using your mailing servers to spam others. Make sure your firewalls for email and anti-viral applications are current and active. The last thing you want is your domain being flagged by Spamhaus because one computer on your network is infected with spamming malware.

One of the best ways to avoid many problems is making sure you have adequate cyber security on your website. Otherwise, you could open the door to several ways which poor security measures can hurt your success.

Use Email Responsibly

Email is one of the most effective tools for marketing. It’s also cause for one of the greatest nuisances online. By being mindful of the above rules, you can keep your email accounts from being blacklisted by others. You can be successful while following true to the CAN-SPAM act as long as you’re not trying to game the system.

The post How to Comply with the CAN-SPAM Act appeared first on GreenGeeks.

While this is certainly annoying for all types of emails, it is particularly troublesome for business messages.

For this reason, many email platforms and applications have built-in spam filtering tools that help reduce the flow of junk mail. While these are useful, sometimes they are not enough and you need to go one step further to protect yourself.

Today, I am going to demonstrate how to do this using the anti-spam tools provided in your cPanel.

Is Email Spam Really That Big of A Deal?

If you have been using email for a long time, you may have become immune to the frustrations of spam messages. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are still incredibly annoying, especially for a business.

And unfortunately, your business email will most likely receive far more spam than a typical email because it is widely accessible.

Think about it, do you have a Contact Us page? You probably should, and it should contain your email address. You will be bombarded with requests to collaborate, trade backlinks, and SEO marketing teams looking to reach out.

Not to mention your typical junk mail that every email seems to get.

Why is this so problematic? Well, you can set your email up to receive a variety of notifications. This can range from payment receipts to support questions.

Typically, you need to respond to these as quickly as possible, and having spam mail get in the way is going to slow you down.

How to Protect Your Email Against Spam

Your cPanel provides numerous features that you can take advantage of. Spam filters are one of those and setting them up is reasonably straightforward.

That said, you do need to have created an email address before you can configure it.

Note: For all GreenGeek customers, the SpamAssassin in cPanel is active by default. You cannot disable it.

Step 1: Access the Spam Filters in cPanel

Begin by logging into your cPanel account, and locate the Email section at the top. Click on the Spam Filters option.

The Spam Filters section allows you to configure the Apache SpamAssassin settings of your account. By default, your web host may enable it so that the SpamAssassin works immediately and processes all new emails for you.

If this feature is not active by default, enable it.

Aside from this, you have two other options to deal with spam. The first is to enable auto-delete and the second is to use blacklisting. These are quite easy to configure but require manual activation, so let’s begin.

Step 2: Configuring SpamAssassin Auto-Delete

Directly below this is an option to have SpamAssassin automatically delete the emails it marks as spam. Now, this isn’t a simple decision. You see, spam filters are not 100% accurate.

There are many instances where real emails get marked as spam by accident, and having those emails permanently deleted can be a bad thing.

That said, if you do not actively check your spam folder, then they were probably already never going to get seen.

In most cases, activating the feature is harmless and can help reduce the amount of spam you visibly see, but the choice is yours. If you would rather not activate it, skip this step.

Start by enabling the auto-delete option.

Below this, there is an option to configure the auto-delete settings. Click on this link.

This gives you the opportunity to set how strongly the auto-delete threshold is. This is to help with false positives (messages marked as spam that are not spam). The default value is 5, but you can increase the number to make fewer emails get marked as spam.

Alternatively, you can lower the value to mark more messages as spam. I personally recommend the default value, but the choice is yours.

If you need further help understanding this score, click the “Spam Threshold Score” link.

Step 3: Configuring SpamAssassin Whitelist and Blacklist

A more involved method you can take is to manually blacklist certain email addresses. For instance, if you continuously receive emails from a specific address, you can blacklist it so they can never send you another one…to that particular email address.

That said, they could make a new address and bypass this, so the effectiveness is not really that amazing for those dedicated to spamming you.

On the flip side, you can whitelist certain emails, so they are never considered spam.

This is great for automated messages from your own site of tools, or if you just notice that certain emails are being flagged as spam that shouldn’t be.

You can find these options at the bottom in the advanced settings section by clicking on the Show Additional Configurations option.

You’ll see two options, one for whitelisting and one for blacklisting. Adding and removing addresses is identical for each one, so I’ll just demonstrate blacklisting. Just be aware the effects are opposite to one another.

Click the Edit Spam Blacklist Settings option.

Click on the Add A New ‘blacklist_from’ Item option. This will make a textbox appear so that you can enter an email address. You actually have two options you can enter.

The first is to add a specific email address to block. For instance, you might want to block sender@ggexample.com because they constantly send you spam emails despite requesting to be removed from their list.

This is pretty straightforward but limited in its usefulness. Alternatively, you can block email messages from an entire domain. In this case, you could type “*@ggexample.com” into the box.

Note the asterisk before the “@” symbol.

This would block every email that comes from the “ggexample.com” domain. I only recommend doing this for domains that are specifically only sending spam mail to your account.

Do not use it to block popular domains like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. as this can block real people from contacting you unless that is your goal.

Click the “Update Whitelist (whitelist_from)” or “Update Blacklist (blacklist_from)” button to save your entries.

Then just click on the “Update Blacklist” button to finish. The process is identical to whitelisting.

By following these steps, you should reduce the amount of spam on your email account. That said, it’s impossible to fully protect any account from spam, as spamming entities find new ways to get around these systems.

It’s a never-ending battle.

Stop Spam From Clogging Up Your Inbox Today

Spam emails are a big business. In fact, it’s so big that nearly half of all emails are actually spam. And that’s because spammers can earn a lot of money. In fact, estimates say they could earn around $7,000 a day.

As you can imagine, many people pursue this in hopes of getting rich quickly. Yet the reality is that it inconveniences just about everyone trying to use email as a communication platform.

For this reason, email platforms invest billions into anti-spam tools to help improve the experience. Don’t waste another day deleting spam yourself. Use the tools at your disposal to reduce spam.

How many spam emails do you get every day? What did you choose as a spam threshold?

The post How to Protect Your Email From Spam appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Because email is still one of the top forms of marketing and online communication, it’s important to take steps to protect yourself from unsolicited messages. This is one of the major reasons why I advise not to place email addresses in WordPress.

Today, I’m going to show you how to hide emails from spammers using an encoder. This essentially encrypts any email address on your site preventing harvesters from collecting them. It’s a great way to restrict how much spam you get throughout the day.

Why Should You Use an Email Address Encoder?

The comment section is only one area of WordPress that is often affected by spam. Keeping your inbox clear of this debris is also vital to remaining efficient and safe.

One of the biggest reasons to encode your addresses is to prevent spammers from adding it to message lists. These lists are often sold off to companies who practice mass spamming. Even some legitimate businesses will use these lists for mass advertising.

Perhaps a hacker wants to spread malware or phishing emails to as many addresses as possible. He or she will send out harvesters to build a massive list and send out corrupted messages in bulk.

Because spam is still such a profound problem on the Internet, I suggest using contact forms when setting up communications from your website. This limits what spammers can find, especially if you use an email address encoder.

Using Email Address Encoder

In this tutorial, I’m going to demonstrate the Email Address Encoder plugin for WordPress. At the time of this article, it’s been several months since it was last updated. However, I verified that it does work with WordPress 4.8.

Access the Plugins area of WordPress and click, “Add New.”

Search, install and activate “Email Address Encoder.”

Once the plugin is activated, it automatically begins encrypting all email addresses detected in WordPress. This includes any that are on posts, pages, in widgets and other places around your site.

Although bots are not able to harvest the email address, humans are still capable of writing down what they see on the page. This doesn’t stop people from spamming you 100 percent of the time, but it will greatly reduce how often your address is harvested.

Most people today would rather have the simplicity of a bot harvest the addresses than to spend time and energy to create an email list by hand.

Because people are still capable of accessing the address, I would suggest using an account that you’re not too worried about when it comes to spam. For instance, you can use “sales@yourwebsite.com” instead of a personal address for a sales department.

How Does the Encoder Hide Emails from Spammers

For this tutorial, I added a fake email address to my contact page. As you can see, the address is still visible as is the “mailto:” link provided.

However, the underlying coding is where the encoding lies. This is because bots scan a page via code. Bots are currently incapable of using visuals to find information like humans. The need to sift through the actual HTML of a site to gather information.

So when an email harvester visits your website, it sees this:

As you can see from the snippet of code, the email address encoder also hides HTML coded commands as well as text. This means you can show a contact email address in a mailto: link and have less to worry about bots scraping it.

Keep Your Information Safe

You have a lot of options available for security when you use WordPress web hosting. Hiding emails from spammers is only one small part of how you can keep your data safe. Don’t assume that because your website is small you won’t be a victim from spammers and hackers. Do what you can to keep your site a proverbial Fort Knox of security.

What kinds of communication do you provide on your website? How often do people use your contact form, and do you think it’s worth the effort to keep?

The post How to Use an Email Address Encoder to Protect WordPress from Spam appeared first on GreenGeeks.

Luckily, when it comes to blocking robots, WordPress has a great selection of tools at its disposal to help. And with the rise of more advanced AIs, there has never been a better time to protect your site against bots.

Today, I will demonstrate several ways you can keep your WordPress site bot-free.

What Are Spam Bots and Why Block Them?

Spam bots are autonomous applications designed to explore the internet and send spam to websites and other internet users. This can be in the form of creating comments on a site, filling out registration forms, sending out emails from data it collects, and so on.

As you probably already know, it is incredibly annoying dealing with spam, but it also negatively impacts a site.

You see, every time a bot actually visits your site, a search engine like Google can’t tell the difference between it and a real user. As such, it actually impacts your site’s statistics like the bounce rate. As such, it can negatively impact your site’s SEO.

And that’s just one statistic, others include:

• Referral sites
• Duration of visit
• Demographic data
• Number of visits to a webpage

As you can imagine, this will skew any data you view with analytical tools like Google Analytics. Obviously, this is a problem for anyone trying to determine trends and patterns of their user base.

The inclusion of AI makes matters worse in Analytics as something like chatGPT can rack up the view count into the thousands in a single day. Reading your stats afterward is a bit of a pain.

Of course, this is just one problem. The truth is there is usually not just a single bot going on your site. Larger sites can have hundreds or even thousands of bots viewing it at any given time.

They will attempt to leave comments, fill out forms, and do other activities, which ultimately take up site resources to go through.

As such, you need to have systems in place that block spam bots, or at the very least significantly reduce their impact.

4 Steps to Block Bots in WordPress

There are several ways to handle spam bots in WordPress and it really depends on the type of problem you have. You see, all spam bots work differently.

There are some that simply attempt to leave comments with links to another site. In other cases, there are some that will register tons of users so they can try and claim free sign-up bonuses.

Naturally, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. But, by following these steps, you will block most bots in WordPress.

1. Identify Where Spam Bots Can Strike

Naturally, the first thing you need to do is determine where your site can experience problems from spambots.

For example, do you have a comments section on your site? If so, this will most likely be targeted by spambots. Perhaps you allow users to leave product reviews. Essentially, any opportunity a user has to create content on a site is an opportunity for a bot to do the same.

Being aware of the different areas a spambot can strike allows you to prepare security measures that block bots from accessing them.

2. Update Your Theme, WordPress, and Plugins

One of the first steps you should take to improve the security of WordPress is to make sure everything is up to date.

Some bots specifically target security vulnerabilities in older versions of these files, which have been patched out in the latest version of the software. As such, staying up to date is one of the best defenses against malicious bots probing your site.

In some cases, if the vulnerability is detected, your site will then be the target of a hacker. Luckily, it is very easy to keep WordPress up to date. Not only does this help keep your site safe but ensures you do not run into compatibility issues with other tools.

3. Implement CAPTCHA in These Areas

Once you have identified where spam bots can strike, it is time to actually protect against those bots.

One of the best ways to do this is to protect these areas with CAPTCHA or reCATPCHA. CAPTCHA is a challenge-response system, where the user must solve some type of challenge question. This can be identifying what letters are on the screen, choosing images, or something else.

The idea behind it is that a lot of bots cannot solve these types of questions, which means only real users can access things like comment sections, forms, and so on. And when it comes to adding CAPTCHA in WordPress, there are several plugins you can use to do it.

Be sure to check out our list of plugins you can use further down this article.

4. Constantly Monitor Your Site

The most important step is to understand that you always need to be vigilant when it comes to blocking bots in WordPress.

The intelligence of bots is increasing every year, and AI is being incorporated into everything. As such, the number of methods bots are beginning to use is growing and becoming more sophisticated. As such, how you combat them is also going to change.

Staying up to date on information on the subject is critical to figuring out a game plan and making adjustments when needed. Luckily, many tools will update for you and incorporate necessary changes ASAP, but being aware is the best defense.

You will always be fighting spam bots – there is no ultimate solution.

3 Ways to Tell if You Have Bot Traffic

One of the first things you need to determine is if you have bot traffic. Since bots can fool search engines like Google, actually determining if you have a bot problem isn’t always straightforward.

That said, there are some obvious tell-tale signs that should tip you off to any bot activity on your site.

1. Check the Comment Section

Generally speaking, the first place any website will spam bots on their website is the comment section, assuming you have one. Review comments left on your site and determine if they are written by a real person, or were from a bot.

You may be wondering how exactly you would determine this, and honestly, there are a lot of ways to tell.

One of the tell-tale signs of a bot in the comment section is that they don’t set up a gravatar or avatar for their profile. While this isn’t uncommon for regular users either, it is a good indicator when combined with other oddities.

The next thing to look at is the email address associated with the account. These are usually not normal emails and consist of random letters or numbers, or they are actually advertising their site in the email itself.

And speaking of advertising, the actual comment usually contains a link back to a site or product they are promoting. In some cases, it will just be a generic comment that doesn’t sound natural and may even have some spelling mistakes.

When you look at all of these factors together, it is pretty easy to identify a spam comment in WordPress.

2. Check New Users

Depending on how you have your comment system set up, you may require users to sign up to leave a comment. Thus, if you notice that there are spam comments, you need to also look at the users who are leaving them.

Spam bots have become sophisticated enough to create a new user in WordPress if a website does not include CAPTCHA.

Thus, you need to take a minute and identify if the user profiles that have been registered to your site are real. To identify these accounts, there are a few signs to look for that include things like:

• No Avatar/Gravatar
• Unnatural email
• Linking to another website

Registered users have more chances to interact with your site and inject spam in the form of comments, reviews, or any other type of user submission. While getting rid of the accounts may seem like a great solution to the problem, it’s only a temporary bandaid.

Spam bots can just make another account and start doing it again. Thus, you need to block that ability first with CAPTCHA.

3. View Website Analytics

Most websites will utilize Google Analytics to keep an eye on their website statistics like traffic.

This is a very powerful tool, but spam bots will influence statistics like the bounce rate or page traffic. As such, you can usually spot unnatural bumps in statistics that may have come from bots. This is also a great way to identify what they are doing on your site.

For example, let’s say you notice on one day, a page received three times the traffic it normally does and has a very high bounce rate. That is a clear sign that bots were viewing that page and quickly left.

Thus, it looks like a viewer to Google, and because the bot was only there for a few seconds, it thinks that users clicked off of your site very fast, thus increasing your bounce rate. Sometimes it is not as obvious as this example, but look for oddities.

One great tip is to use the dates a comment from a spam bot is created on your site, or when the user that left it was registered. This can help you identify days and times you know there was bot activity on your site. Then, correlate that timestamp with that in your analytics tool.

It could help you identify a pattern or at the very least see an example of it.

3 Plugins to Block Bots in WordPress

Naturally, you may be looking for tools that can help you block bots. Luckily, there are a lot of great plugins to block spam in WordPress. And many of them are actually free to use.

Be sure to check out our full list for even more options.

1. Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

Akismet has the unique honor of being the only plugin that is pre-installed on WordPress. It is made by the same developers behind WordPress and is compatible with most plugins on the platform.

In truth, Akismet is easily the best spam protection plugin in WordPress and you can use it for free.

By default, the plugin focuses on protecting your comment section and will automatically detect comments that are spam and mark them as such. You can then review them and clear them out.

You can also set this up to automatically delete the spam to save disk space.

The real power behind Akismet would be its integrations. It can integrate with most plugins and will help block spam from the features those plugins add.

For instance, if you install Gravity Forms, there is an add-on for Akismet that blocks spam form submissions.

Benefits of Using Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

• Constantly updated to easily identify new spam patterns
• Built on the Cloud to avoid slowing down WordPress
• Dashboard shows analytics for blocking spam
• No clutter in WordPress, you can’t even tell it is there
• Boasts 99.99% accuracy at determining spam

Cost of Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection

• The base plugin is free and so is the API key.
• Paid plans exist for larger sites and the prices are determined by the number of times the API is accessed.

2. CAPTCHA 4WP

When you want to block bots in WordPress, there is no better solution than adding CAPTCHA. And in WordPress, there are plenty of plugins to choose from, but the CAPTCHA 4WP plugin is easily one of the best options.

The free version of this plugin works well for most sites as it includes the essentials.

This includes adding CAPTCHA to the comment section, registration process, and password set areas of your site. This will prevent a bot from completing the signup process and covers everything that WordPress offers by default.

The premium version includes even more options like adding CAPTCHA to WooCommerce and dedicated compatibility with most major form builders. Overall, it is the perfect CAPTCHA plugin to block bots in WordPress.

Benefits of Using CAPTCHA 4WP

• Detects the visitor’s language and shows the CAPTCHA in that language
• Easy-to-follow setup wizard
• Choose from multiple reCAPTCHA versions
• Long list of plugin compatibilities
• Includes failover to avoid marking real users as spam

Cost of CAPTCHA 4WP

• This is a free plugin
• Premium plans begin at $14.99

3. Blackhole for Bad Bots

The Blackhole for Bad Bots is a very interesting plugin that is great for bot attack prevention in WordPress. It doesn’t focus on actually preventing spam like other plugins, but focuses on actually blocking the source – the bot itself.

The plugin essentially adds a booby trap onto your site that only bad bots will trigger thus blocking them.

So how does this work? It creates a hidden link in your site’s footer areas, and don’t worry, regular users won’t be able to see it. You then add a simple line to your site’s robots.txt file that forbids bots from following the link.

This means that good bots like search engine bots trying to index your pages will not follow the link, but bad bots that ignore what you say will. The end result, the bot gets blocked when it follows that trapped link.

Benefits of Using Blackhole for Bad Bots

• The plugin is easy to use with minimal input from the user
• Real users will not notice that it is on your site
• By default, whitelists all bots from search engines like Google, Bing, and so on
• Create a custom message the bot sees when it is blocked
• Compatible with other security plugins

Cost of Blackhole for Bad Bots

• The base plugin is free
• Premium plans start at $20

Spam Bot FAQ for WordPress

Don’t Let Bots Spam Your WordPress Site

As you can see, a lot of thought needs to go into blocking spam bots in WordPress. There are plenty of ways to go about it, but it really depends on your site. For instance, a blog is going to have different needs than an eCommerce site as far as spam is concerned.

As such, identifying what bots can interact with on your site is one of the most important steps when you want to block bots in WordPress.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful for reducing the spam on your site.

Does your website attract a lot of spam? What plugin do you use to fight spam?

The post The Easiest Way to Block Spam Bots in WordPress appeared first on GreenGeeks.