Don’t Let Comment Spam Hurt Your SEO

Don’t Let Comment Spam Hurt Your SEO

Do not Let Comment Spam Hurt Your SEOWe 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!

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12 Comments

  • avatar

    I am a beginner at SEO. So I didn’t know how spam comments hurt my SEO. I am so grateful to you for teaching me how I could keep my SEO safe. These tips are very helpful and easy to follow. Thank you!

  • avatar

    I am also in the digital marketing field and I love to read a blog related to my field especially on blog comments. This is a very helpful blog for me. Thanks

  • avatar

    I follow the tips from Google to stop comment spam. I use Akismet and CleanTalk anti-spam plugins for my Colorado Notary Blog. I also moderate and delete short, thin, generic comment spam such as thank you, good post, well written, that do not contain any relevant keywords or add any value to the blog post.

  • avatar

    Yeah your are right “Colin”, We all are agree with you and i like your “Turn On Comment Moderation” because its very important.

  • avatar

    I was just reviewing an article on Criticue and the page I looked at was filled with spammy comments. Needed confirmation that it can hurt your SEO and linked him to here for some more information. Cheers!

  • avatar

    I agree with Jay. I have just turned Askimet on and it seems to be extremely powerful. From what I know, these blog spammers are actually hurting their SEO. Is this correct?
    No idea why they still spam like this….

  • avatar

    Yes Colin, I am agree with you and i like your “Turn On Comment Moderation” point because this is the safest way to save your site from spammers.

  • avatar

    There is nothing worse than scrolling down after a good post to participate in a useful discussion or learn form other comments to find it is all nonsense and spam, so I completely agree with kicking out spam comments from ANY blog.
    I don’t completely agree with the nofollow setting though. I get that nofollow is less attractive so spammers have less reason to get comments into your blog, but it’s also less attractive for others to leave comments too and I prefer to reward my readers than punish the spammers.
    I use a plugin that separates out most of the spam and I believe there are set ups where you can change dofollow/nofollow for specific comments/people which is a great way to reward loyal readers.

  • avatar

    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?

  • avatar

    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.

  • avatar

    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.

  • avatar

    Thanks for the very helpful information. I enjoyed reading your article about SEO and I found it very interesting. Staying tuned for more.

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