View Posts by 
We often hear that making a site dynamic and allowing users to be active within a web site is a good thing. Not only for the sake of good content, but also to make your web site more appealing through interactivity. We at TechWyse always recommend the usage of a blog as a means to capture both elements (content and interactivity).
Wherever there is a positive thing, it can often attract a negative reaction. With a utility like a blog, spammers often try to take advantage of a poorly secured commenting system. Blogs can allow users to make comments on each blog, and although positive comments can be a good thing, if you are not monitoring it carefully, spammy comments can creep in and not only make your site look less credible, but it can also harm your organic search ranking.
Comment spam is usually done by site owners who believe it will help with SEO and are usually pretty easy to spot, normally containing one liners or links.
Avoid Comment Spam Abuse
Google recently blogged about Comment Spam at their blog, and offer the following recommendations:
- Disallow anonymous posting.
- Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
- Turn on comment moderation.
- Use the "nofollow" attribute for links in the comment field.
- Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
- Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.
These are all good recommendations and you should check your blog software to see if you can implement any of these suggestions.
If you have checked your web site now and notice lots of spammy comments, it’s not too late. Go through your comments, and delete the spammy ones. If you use blog software like WordPress make sure to enable the AKISMET plugin immediately!
Related posts:
4 Responses to “Don’t Let Comment Spam Hurt Your SEO”
Thanks for the very helpful information. I enjoyed reading your article about SEO and I found it very interesting. Staying tuned for more.
sue
December 2nd, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Akismet plugin helps a lot to block the spam comments. They say not to delete the spam comments for certain days from the spam area of comments so that the Akismet will identify it as spam and update their database. If genuine comments are treated as spam then remove it from the spam area, this needs to be done 2 or 3 times and Akismet will automatically remove such author’s comments out of spam. Isn’t it Great? Moreover it would be better to use re-captcha to block automated comment posting.
December 3rd, 2009 at 12:30 am
Thanks for the post, I’m having a tougher time in dealing with spammy comments on my blog, fed up with the moderator role too. This info comes at a good time as I am intending to install some anti spam plugins, was thinking of installing Hashcash after trying different plugins with little success. Now I decided to go with Akismet. Guess I can install Hashcash alongwith Akismet.
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:53 am
Jay: Thanks for the highly useful information. As there is no ‘one size fits all’ method that protect our blog from spammers, sharing experiences like this is surely a reference for many. Now by default current versions of WordPress has Akismet, Not sure, is that adequate enough to combat spam comments?
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:54 pm