How Removing Website URL Field on WordPress Comment Form Can Reduce Spam

The major reason why webmasters through blackhat SEO uses WordPress comment form to spam for backlink is because of the presence of website URL field on the form.

This field is the direct attraction because it afforded them the opportunity to add links on the sites they want to post comment on thereby passing supposed link juice to other sites they linked to. Little do they know (the unsuspecting and naive blogger or website owners that contracted cheap SEO companies or individuals) that quality is far better than quantity.

Then, the fact that “nofollow tag” has been instituted on submitted comments on WordPress powered site since January 18, 2005 further makes it worthless and irrelevant from SEO standpoint.

Nevertheless, people still continue to engage in spam links using comment form as their main target. Irrespective of the measures you put in place to curtail spam activities on your site; you’ll still find pockets of these activities here and there. You just have to keep putting measures in place to checkmate these nefarious activities. Let me share my experience with you on spam comment.

My experience

When I started out blogging on this website, I use to receive many comments. If not for my experience on blogger where I actually learnt how to blog and also read tech and marketing blogs extensively. I would have made a mess of myself because I would have being approving some spam comments without knowing it.

How would you have rated this site if we approved comments like the one on the image below? No doubt you would have questioned our credibility as WordPress consultant.However, spam commenter’s can be very crafty sometimes. They’ve introduced lots of creativity in the way they craft out content. You just have to be smart because not every comment without links is actually legitimate. You need to read through them to see if actually it relates or add to the theme of discussion.

I would have loved to run through how to know or recognise a comment spam even by mere looking at it and reading through. But, I tend to consider your time and the need to quickly take you through ‘how to remove website url on comment form’.
It’s like I heard you say “I want to know how to recognise spam comments. Okay then, let’s dive straight into the deep.

Simple ways to recognise comment spam

-Their names are somewhat weird and can be hard to pronounce. Neither do they represent a brand.

– The email too looks weird and does not exist. That’s why it is always necessary to double check email list generated from the check box placed below the comment form before sending newsletter or blog post to those subscribers.

-Sometimes they use Facebook address links that does not only exist, but has no meaningful activities.

– Most times their content are off track, promotional in nature and far away from point of discuss. Therefore, they do not contribute any meaningful opinion to the content.

– The presence of two or more links is always an acid test to spam comment. This is not a general rule though. You just have to read through and study the link destination for confirmation.

– They sometimes target a particular post mostly the one that have the capacity to rank better on SERP for a particular keyword they target.

– They bombard your site periodically even if you’ve not publish blog post for sometime. So, they don’t really target fresh content

– They sometimes use the name of a brand such as ‘Make money online’, ‘Big profit online’, ‘Blog home money’, Best WordPress themes’, etc. They do this because names are hyperlinked by default on comment form by the website url provided.

The way out

One of the best ways to save yourself from the stress of editing heaps of pending comments is to discourage the intent of spam commenters. You can achieve this by removing the website url field from comment form because that is their main juicy target.

Yes, they can still post spam comment with links within the main comment box, but you can override this on “Discussion” setting on your WP dashboard. Ok, let’s go on to the business of today.

How to remove website URL field from WordPress comment form

The main fields that constitute WordPress comment form by default are:

Name:

Email:

Website url:

Message box:

To remove the website url field, you need to install and activate a plugin called “Disable/Hide Comment URL“.

You don’t need to go to any setting page because this plugin automatically remove the website url field box on the form. How simple!

However, this plugin is actually dated, but it still works with the current WordPress version. So, there is no reason for the plugin developer to update it. It would not break your site either because it is lightweight.

You might choose to add the code to your function.php file on your active theme. To do that, copy the code below and paste it on that file (function.php).

function disable_comment_url($fields) {
unset($fields['url']);
return $fields;
}
add_filter('comment_form_default_fields','disable_comment_url');

It is better to install the plugin except you intend to add the code to your child theme so that you don’t lose the code when you update the theme.

Conclusion: You can see that it is pretty simple to remove website URL field that most spam commenters target to drop over-crowded comments that ultimately becomes problematic to manage.

That is why we stem-up comment protection policy on this blog because it’s better not to have people comment than to start managing worthless comments that eat up our precious time. Time they say is money!

Wouldn’t you rather remove this url field and have peace of mind or better still, use other spam protection techniques like “Honeypot” or “Akismet“? What do you think?