Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, it also shows up as comments and track-back on your WordPress site. Luckily, you can first set up your site to moderate comments, so spam won’t be visible on your site.

And then, you can make use of a really nifty plugin called Akismet, which automatically filters out your spam.

Created by the folks who created WordPress, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not, and lets you review the spam it catches under your website’s “Comments” admin screen. Akismet is one of only a few plugins that is already installed when you first install WordPress – that’s how important (and good) it is. You simply: 1) activate the plugin; 2) sign up for an Akismet API key; and, 3) go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.

Your search engine optimization will be boosted as you keep spammers from bringing down your site’s ranking. By the way, this plugin is available not only for WordPress, but other software as well.

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. So if you’re not currently using Akismet, give your WordPress site a spring cleaning by setting up this plugin, and de-cluttering your website’s spam. You’ll save yourself a lot of time by not having to manually cull through all the comments (thecomputerspirit.com gets about 100 spam emails per day), and you’ll help the ranking of your site too!

Very little elbow grease required.