I've set up my blog so that all comments have to be approved by me before they are published live. The reason I approve all comments first is to prevent any offensive comments from making it online, as well as any spam.

For example, I deleted the following comments just this morning:

"This is my first time i visit here. I discovered so numerous interesting stuff in your weblog especially its discussion. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not the only one having all of the enjoyment here! Maintain up the great work."

"I really appreciate your post and you explain each and every point very well.Thanks for sharing this information.And I’ll love to read your next post too."

"A virtual assistant can help you grow your business by handling your administrative support tasks. You can outsource various tasks like accounting, advertising, clerical, administrative, answering phone calls, internet research, data entry and technical support tasks to a virtual assistant. And the best part is that you can relax and enjoy your vacation or holidays while all your works are done by your virtual assistant."

"This is a really good read for me. Must agree that you are one of the coolest blogger I ever saw. Thanks for posting this useful information. This was just what I was on looking for. I’ll come back to this blog for sure! I bookmarked this blog a while ago because of the useful content and I am never being disappointed. Keep up the good work."

"Very good post, I was really searching for this topic, as I wanted this topic to understand completely and it is also very rare in internet, that is why it was very difficult to understand. Thank you for sharing this."

So how do I know the above comments are spam? Easy, none of the comments refer directly to any particular post, with the exception of the VA comment. And that comment is so blatantly generic, it's obviously spam.

Here's a little trick I use to weed out the crap: If you suspect a comment might be spam, or you're not really sure, just copy and paste the comment into Google's search box. And if it's spam, you'll see the same exact comment on blogs all over the Internet.

David Jackson