Build My Site for Free

Hi, guys.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s tutorial, I am going to explain to you what the plugin Akismet is and how to set it up.

And for those of you that don’t know, Akismet is a plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. So you pretty much don’t ever have to worry about comment spam or trackback spam after you’ve installed and activated Akismet.  So to go about installing it, what you want to do is go to your plugins link on your navigation menu and click “Add New.”  And this will bring you to the Install Plugins page.

So here, you can type in Akismet, and this is how it is spelled; or you can come to BuildMySiteForFree.com, click on the plugins link, and it will be on the second page in alphabetical order under Akismet.

And from here, you would download it to your computer as a zip file.  By the way, you always want to download themes and plugins as a .zip file.  And then you’re going to come back and you would click “Upload” and upload the plugin from there.

And once it’s uploaded, it’s activated and ready to use.  So the next thing that you’d want to do is you want to come to where it says – let’s just
find this, hold on – plugins, and you’re going to open it back up and you would click “Akismet Configuration.”  And in order for Akismet to work, you need an API key.

So to find your API key, you can go to your WordPress blog account, and that is how you find it.

And then once you do, you would type in that key right in this box here. Now mine’s says that it’s valid already because I’ve already entered my
key.  But for those of you that have just installed Akismet, you will have a little message at the top of your Dashboard in the like, a yellow-orange box, and it will say that in order for Akismet to start working, you need to type in your API key.

So this is the page you will come to from your plugins link on the navigation menu.  You type in your key here, and then once you’ve entered it, it will tell you in green that the key is now valid and Akismet is ready to work.

Now what’s also great is that Akismet holds spam for 15 days before deleting it from the database, and this is good because – you know what? – sometimes Akismet may mark a certain comment as spam, and it’s not.  So what you would do is you’d come to “Comments,” you’d click “Spam,” and all of this spam would be found in this box right here.  I currently have no spam comments, which is great.

But it would all be in this box, and you can check through them to make sure that they’re all spam.  If one isn’t, you would just mark it, from
going to Bulk Actions, Not Spam, and you would click “Apply,” and it would then be on your comments section for your blog. And if you’ve looked through them and noticed that none of them…that they all are, in fact, spam and Akismet is working, then you would just click
“Empty Spam.”

So you do have 15 days to often check this just to make sure.  Usually, you probably won’t have any, but it’s always just a good feature to have.  And what’s so great about Akismet is you rarely need to worry about your spam. You don’t have to worry that it’s on your blog; it’s usually always right here in your spam, and you only have to check it every once in a while.

And this is how you use Akismet.  Please watch our video on how to find the API key, and thank you for watching.