So you’ve started a WordPress website. But now you keep getting emails asking you to moderate comments on your pages; and when you look at the comments, some of them are gibberish strings of characters, and some of them are just generic lines like “I’ve really been looking for this type of content, but haven’t found it written as well as you have! Thanks!” followed by a link to some website that has no connection to your page. Welcome to the world of comment spam.
Comment spam came about because search engines (like Google) take stock of how many links point to a website in order to determine how authoritative that site it; and the more authoritative a site it, the higher it ranks. The thinking is that, if you’re researching something that relates to your website, and you find an article or product that you think your followers would appreciate, you’ll post a link to that article or product. It’s a vote of confidence. And if 1 vote is good, 5,000 must be great, right? 5,000 webmasters can’t be wrong. So search engines have been using links pointing to a site (called “backlinks” when they’re pointing your site) as an important factor in determining ranking.
Enter the spammers. They realized this, so they started going on all the blogs they could find and dropping a link to their websites; the sophisticated ones even wrote software to do it for them. Some of them began putting up “link farms,” a series of value-less websites with the sole purpose of generating a lot of links to the sites the spammers wanted to rank.
Well, as soon as the search engines realized what was happening, and why all of these sleazy websites were ranking so well, they set about to combat these tactics. And the fight continues. But some people, in spite of the fact that comment spam is a very risky tactic, are still spamming blogs and websites. So that’s why you’re seeing those links. So if you see a comment on your site that isn’t relevant, seems like it was written by a computer, or has a link to an irrelevant page with no explanation, you should think about trashing it. (You can also add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to any links that people post in comments if you think the comment is relevant but can’t decide if it’s a legitimate site or not.)
However, it’s worth asking yourself whether you even want to allow comments on Pages in your site, anyways. Engaging with your audience through feedback is a great way to gain fans, but there is a time and a place for commenting directly on a page. Lots of people choose to disable comments on pages but leave them enabled on posts; some people disable them all together. But you should definitely be aware that WordPress, having started out as simply a blogging platform, defaults to having comments enabled. You can disable them in Settings > Discussion, although some themes sidestep that feature, which means you might need to modify the theme a little bit. (Please don’t try this unless you know what you’re doing.)
Here’s a helpful thread discussing the ins and outs of turning them on or off: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/turn-off-comments-on-pages-by-default. The participants have an enlightening back-and-forth about turning comments off for pages vs. posts, as well as editing the header and page files.