Does your blog receive a lot of comments? Spending hours moderating comments and determining what is or isn’t spam can be extremely frustrating. However, allowing spam comments to sit unattended could leave a negative taste in your readers’ mouths, and they could even cause your site to rank lower in search engine results, according to Google.

While deactivating the comments section of your site is a surefire way to get rid of spam, doing so will prevent you from having conversations and building relationships with your readers. Removing comments might solve one problem… but it could also create new ones.

So, how do you accept comments without inviting spammers in to leave irrelevant ones? Read on for a deeper look at what spam is, where it comes from, and how you can prevent it from getting into your site in the first place.