5 Avoidable Mistakes that Will Flag Your Comment as SPAM

I have a lot of fun working on our holistic health and wellness blog here at the American College of Healthcare Sciences. Almost two years ago, we decided to focus on our ACHS Health and Wellness Blog, free eBooks, and free webinars as a way to extend our Social Mission to provide free engaging, tangible, and scientific-based information to the public outside our immediate area in Portland, Oregon.

We’ve offered free, local classes and workshops since we opened our United States office in Lake Oswego in 1989, but even after moving to our new location in Portland in 2002, we started running out of room last year! Since we’re one of a few accredited online holistic health schools available (we have students in 50 states and 80 countries), it made sense to connect with our fans and the public in the same online forum.

Thanks to all of you—our readers and subscribers who read and share our blog posts with your friends and family via Facebook, Twitter, email, or even printing a copy to hand out—our holistic health and wellness blog has become hugely successful. One post had over 250 Facebook likes!

Sadly, along with Internet fame comes spammers and trolls. As much as the endless comments about SEO, diet tips, and extra large boy bits “entertain” us (and by entertain I mean drive us crazy), they interrupt the flow of comments from real people our faculty, students, and alums, and they take hours to moderate and delete. And some of those comments are very hard to erase from your brain!

So, you’ll be delighted to know that we’ve recently migrated to a new platform that has much better spam control. We now require everyone to retype a Captcha code to post their comment, and all comments are organized neatly in HubSpot’s new COS blog tool. This gives us better control and oversight (for example, we can now search for key terms spammers use so we can delete them quickly—yay HubSpot for the new COS blog tool!).

You’ll also notice that we now have threaded comments so we can reply and comment to each other more easily. We can now keep track of who said what and to whom. In this migration I’ve already spotted some unanswered questions from months ago that simply got buried in the spam jungle!

Therefore, in the interest of blog comment harmony and meaningful conversation, I thought I’d put together a list of five avoidable mistakes that will most certainly get your comment flagged and deleted as spam:

1. Have a name that involves sexy dancing, sex, diets, or SEO. As weird as some names are, I seriously doubt that your parents called you “sexy dancer,” so that sends a red flag right up.
2. Use really (really) bad grammar and spelling. I know that English is a second language (or third or fourth) for some of our visitors, but rambling weirdness is a sign of a spammer.
3. Include links to your SEO site, website development company, or sex toy site. By the way—feel free to share relevant websites that you think other folks will enjoy, but include them with a bit of a commentary so we know what they are. Let us know why anyone would want to go visit them.
4. Talk about something completely unrelated to the blog topic. Like obeying the police when we’re talking about kale smoothies. While many police are into holistic nutrition, I’m pretty sure the two are not related. At all.
5. Post a two word comment, like “thanks” or “good article” and a link to some website.

Blogs are a fantastic way to keep connected with fun, interesting, and hopefully practical tips for your life as a wellness warrior. Hopefully, our new tools mean you don’t have to scroll through all the spammy nonsense and we can all return to having a bit of a normal conversation about the things that matter.