A blog is a great way to get regularly updated, relevant, unique and good quality onto your website. Getting fresh content like this onto your website everyday can play a big part in the success of your website and your SEO campaign. Most blogs will allow users to post comments on your blogs, which have to be moderated before they are published. Comments are great because they can start discussion and add new content to your site. Infact, Google treats comments as updates to the pages.
However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot. They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:
- Nice blog! I’m now subscribing to your feed, and I’m looking forward to your next post
- Thanks for this post, I found it really interesting
- I came across this website and I’m so glad I found it
It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.
So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help. Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!
The dangers of SPAM comments on your blog
However, be aware of SPAM comments. Most of the time these are easy to spot. They won’t make much sense and are normally peppered with dozens of links to very dubious sounding websites! These should be deleted and definitely shouldn’t be approved. However, some of the comments are starting to quite clever and are quite generic in that the response doesn’t look out of place in most blogs. Recent examples I have seen include:
It’s easy to see why most people don’t suspect these comments to be SPAM posts, there are no obvious links and people like receiving comments that are complimentary to their site. However, these comments contain links in the ‘name’ of the user, and often link back to gambling sites or worse. Recently, I have heard of a number of cases where websites have dropped considerably in the rankings purely because they have approved comments with links to these types of site. Because their site is linking to a site that could be blacklisted, or is a known SPAM site, the website has been penalised. Remember, a link to another site is effectively an endorsement for that website so being seen as endorsing that site reduces your credibility and trust ranking.
So what can you do to prevent this? First of all, check all your comments to make sure they do not contain links. If they do, and you’re unsure if they are reliable, simply delete them before approving the comment. You can also ask your programmer or SEO company to “nofollow” all links within the comments section which will help. Be on the look out, and if a comment seems a bit fishy, check it out before you approve it!
Categories: SEO tips and advice
Tagged: blog comments, spam comments
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