Do you write public posts in Google+ and see comments from people you don’t know or not in your circles? Are you annoyed by spam comments and links? Then this may be for you.

Hearing comments and getting to know new people is always fun, moreover that is the whole idea of Google+;  meeting and making new friends.

But that’s not always the case. Among genuine comments you’ll also find spam comments, comments not related to that topic, links to sites that are not related, etc..

There is lot of advantages to a public posts for e.g the post is visible outside Google+, gets indexed by search engines, more people see that post for keyword matches, gain visibility and chances of more followers, etc.. But one of the disadvantage is your post becomes target of comment spam. Make your own judgement when you write public posts because it varies from people to people.

When you have spent great amount of effort into your post and eager to hear feedback from your followers, this is not what you want to see. Digging through spam comments to find genuine ones is a nightmare.

There are couple of solutions to this problem,

Disable comments on public posts from Anyone (public comments)

Disable comments on public posts for Anyone

By default Google+ allows comments on public posts from Anyone (refer image), Change the value for Who can comment on your public posts?. [Click on the gear icon on the top right and click on Google+ settings to reach the above settings]

• Change it to Extended Circles so that people in your circles and people in theirs circle will only be allowed to comment
• Change it to Your circles so that only people you have added in circles will be able to comment
• Change it to Only you so that nobody is allowed to comment except you
• Change it to Custom which allows to pick individuals or circles that are allowed to comment

Flag as inappropriate and report spam

Another better option is to report comments or spam to the Google+ moderation system. More the system is trained less the spam. When you hover over a comment, on the right side of the comment you’ll find two icons

• Click on the x icon to Remove/delete the comment from the post.
• Click on the flag icon to Flag as inappropriate. This is more powerful option, marks the comment as inappropriate and reports to the moderation system. If the person who wrote the comment gets a lot of these, then he might be flagged as a spammer.