The best way to stop spam comments on your Shopify Blog
Writing blog posts regularly can be a key part of the marketing strategy for your Shopify store. It is one of the best ways to provide additional value to potential customers, and also to improve the SEO ranking of your store.
However, many Shopify merchants have found that there are lots of spammers out there who submit spam comments on blog posts, and also that Shopify’s default spam protection is not good enough.
If you are tired of logging in to your Shopify dashboard and scrolling through comments to find real customers amongst the spam, please read on.
Spam comments are a real problem on Shopify Blogs
Our testing shows that even when Shopify thinks a commenter’s email address is potentially spam - and displays a warning on the blog page - the comment still gets added to the merchant’s comment database as a regular comment. This may discourage manual spammers, but bots aren’t reading those warnings, and it is still a hassle for you!
Shopify has recently added reCaptcha protection to some blogs, but as far as we’ve seen this has had a limited impact. Overall, our data shows that comments are 250% times more likely to be spam than genuine, even with this change.
If spammers have found you, you need a solution
We have seen that there are many Shopify blogs who are lucky enough to rarely attract the attention of spammers and bots. However, once you’re on their radar, these spammers can be relentless. We have customers who might get 100 spam comments submitted for every 1 real comment. And these are all spam comments that have gotten past Shopify’s default protection.
Some users get so much spam they consider shutting down their blog, or at least turning off comments. Don’t do this! Comments are a great way to engage with your customers, learn more about what matters to them and demonstrate that you want to build a relationship with them.
These apps can stop comment spam
There are two apps that offer specific spam protection for comment spam, both are paid apps. At this point there are no free apps to stop spam comments on your Shopify blog.
Sunny - Blog Comment Manager (5.0 Rating, $2.99/month)
For Sunny (our app), we developed a proprietary spam filter that provides additional protection over and above Shopify’s reCaptcha integration. Our filter has been trained on over 30,000 comments and catches over 90% of all spam comments.
Real comments are emailed to you, where you can approve them, or reply to the email which will also add that reply to your blog post. If Sunny thinks a comment is spam, it will automatically mark it as spam in the Shopify back-end, and you’ll never get an email or see it as ‘unread’ in your Shopify admin.
For those few comments that slip through our filter, you can simply click the “mark as spam” comment in the email you get from Sunny.
We created Sunny so you can manage blog comments easily without ever having to log in to the Shopify admin again. All of our features have been added after we’ve spoken with merchants like you. You can learn more about how Sunny works here.
reCaptcha spambuster (3.9 Rating, $3/month)
This is a simple app that focuses just on reducing spam comments for your Shopify blog. It uses reCaptcha technology, similar to what Shopify has recently introduced. It uses invisible reCaptcha to minimize distractions for your customers.
Users who have installed the app tend to notice a significant reduction in spam comments, and appreciate the ‘set it and forget it’, nature of the app.
Don’t let spam comments ruin your blog
However you choose to stop the spam comments you’re getting, we hope you find a way to eliminate the pain so you can focus on writing good content instead of worrying about sifting through comments to find the ones from real customers.
If you are looking for more help on how to use Shopify’s blogging tools you can find their guide to writing new posts here
