July 2nd, 2024 – Our WordPress SEO company has spent years monitoring the behavior of manually entered spam that haunts client inboxes across dozens of verticals and have been working on a solution to the issue. Today we introduce our first attempt at stopping this, the Advanced Spam Filter for Lead Generation.

Lead Generation from sources like SEO, Social Media, and PPC is plagued with manually entered contact form spam, often by nefarious actors trying to plant malware on your computer, drain your bank account, or just sell your business random stuff you do not want or need. Previous anti-spam efforts included only using reCAPTCHA or similar bot stopping solutions or internet-wide blacklists of spam keywords. The former only blocks a majority of automated spam, the latter can block content you actually want.

The Advanced Spam Filter works differently by targeting only keywords, email addresses, names, or phone numbers your website or industry are commonly spammed with. With our new Advanced Spam Filter our client’s will see less spam and more valuable contacts in their email inboxes and they’ll have less risk of their email provider filtering out out emails from their own website.

Here’s how the Advanced Spam Filter works:
1. Our team reviews spam leads from your website and looks for common things like the name of a sender or specific keywords they use in their scam that only apply to the spam.

2. Our team reviews spam from similar websites to yours examining our database of thousands of spam messages collected from dozens of websites since 2019.

3. We set our system to block specific names, email addresses, website domains, phone numbers, or keywords in message fields to keep your inbox clean.

4. We continually monitor your inbound leads for spam and adjust our filters as needed.

The spammers never even know they got filtered. Our Advanced Spam Filtering makes it appear as if their message went through. If the spammers are manually entering their contact form spam, that means they’ll see your success message or thank you page and assume it was a successful spam attack.

Testing:
We tested this system before rolling it out and found as much as 98% of all manually entered contact form spam is eliminated and 0% of wanted contacts are filtered.

Limitations:
The Advanced Spam Filter is currently only available to our clients who use WordPress and Gravity Forms.

Caveats:
The Advanced Spam Filter still allows the attacker to see your thank you page which could make it seem like a website is getting more conversions than they really are. Soon our system will be upgraded so that this does not interfere with any conversion tracking. For now we recommend only using the Advance Spam Filter on organic landing pages and not on paid landing pages due to this issue.