Spamming has become one of the major nuisances in the digital world. It not only annoys the site owners but also affects the ranking and drives away the visitors. The spammers have devised new tools, techniques and platforms of spamming. One of the popular ways of spamming is form spamming which hurts your website, especially the blog posts, as your comment section is misused by spammers for their vested interests. Spamming damages your readership and negatively affects your website- whether it is email spamming or contact form spamming, In this blog, we would share different actionable tips to come over this challenge without restricting the experience of genuine blog readers:
What is Contact form spamming?
Submitting irrelevant and unnecessary information or sending phishing messages through contact forms is termed as form spam. These messages may be displayed on the site front-end or directly sent to you.
Manual Spamming Vs Bot Spamming
Manual spamming is done by human beings and is used by different businesses and many black hat SEO providers who wish to get quick back link benefits for their clients by posting their URLs in your form.
The second method is termed as spam bots where the bots are used for spamming your contact form for their vested interests.
With their advanced automated capabilities, the Bots can submit hundreds of spam messages through your contact forms within very brief period. Human spam actors, on the other hand, have limited capabilities in terms of volume but unlike spam bots, they are smart enough to make their way through traditional spam prevention measures.
Here are a few ways to prevent or at least minimize spamming on your site:
Use Contact Forms
If you want to get rid of spam then seriously consider replacing your email address with a contact form. While it is true that email offers a quick, direct and preferable communication method to your visitors, it can also be misused by spam actors for their vested interests.
The new age spam bots not only attempt form spam but can also capture your email addresses and fetch them to the spamming elements which multiply the probabilities of spamming.
Pro Tips
· While creating the contact form, make sure that it should be short and sweet and has minimal fields. Visitors won’t like to reveal unnecessary information like contact number, occupation etc. An ideal form should just need 3 key fields: Name, email address and message.
· While the form allows your visitors to instantly communicate with you just like an email, it also saves you from annoying and time wasting spam messages.
Google reCAPTCHA
Google reCAPTCHA is another efficient way to save you from spam messages. It presents a smart challenge before the form can be submitted. The challenges are easy and quick for the humans but cannot be cracked by the spam bots as they lack the capabilities needed to “detect” these types of challenges.
Hidden Fields
You can also use the methods to trick the spam bots by showing them hidden form fields. Such fields are not visible to human visitors but only to the spam bots as they read “codes” instead of reading your front-end content. And hence if some information is entered into such fields it implies the presence of spam bots. It automatically flags such submissions as spam and they are instantly rejected.
Answer a question to proceed
To keep the things simple you can even ask a human question to your visitors. It could either be a math problem, or a general knowledge questions- or just anything.
Make sure that the question itself is easy and quick for the humans but you may use the format that is not easily discernible by spam bots. For instance you can questions like “What is the total of Five plus Two?”- Instead of framing your question as 5+2= While human visitors can instantly understand and answer the questions, it is a tricky affair for spam bots to understand the math problem presented in simple words without any digits.
Disallowing any types of links
A large number of manual spammers use form spam to gain some SEO juice by creating backlines through your forms. Some making it technically impossible will help you eliminate such spammers and can significantly reduce the spam probabilities. For that you need to disallow links on the blog comments as well as forms. For that you can use the plugins like Perfmatters WordPress plug-in.
Conclusion
Spamming has become the major issue for the websites and blogs across the globe. It is very difficult to stop spamming manually as it requires 24X7 monitoring and manual efforts that can divert attention and hurts productivity. In this blog we have mentioned some of the easy and actionable tips on how to stop spamming on your blog posts and prevent spam actors from misusing your forms for contact form spamming. The readers can assess different methods and then select the one that meets their relevant needs, knowledge level and budget.