Can Spam Comments Hurt Your Blog’s Rankings?
SEO Gadget wrote a blog post about comment spam affecting his rankings. Of course, the grand conclusion is that spam comments hurt his rankings. I can understand where that conclusion came from. I also agree. It can, and does, happen.
Search Engine Optimization Journal’s conclusion is that those comments were harmful because they were porn-related content. That’s possible too, but doubtful. One of the issues regarding spam comments, as pointed out by Scotland SEO, is that they are supposed to be nofollow.
It doesn’t matter is blog comments are dofollow or nofollow, the search engines will treat them the way they want to and you can’t afford to let the bad links hurt your site’s reputation. That’s why comment moderation is so important. It’s also why you need to keep a close eye on which types of comments get through on your blog. We at BCP automatically delete the following types of comments when we spot them:
- Porn links
- Obvious keyword-spam with several links in the body of the comment
- Comments where the commenter used an obvious incorrect website URL
- Comments with dead or broken links, particularly in the website URL field of the comment form
- “Feel good” comments that add no value to the discussion
Some comments are helpful; some are not. We try to get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones. Otherwise, your blog can suffer in the search engines. If you aren’t sure which comments have value and which ones don’t then you might be better off letting someone else manage that aspect of your blog. That’s what blog managers do.
Professional Management for Business Blogs
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@Allen: You should add the recent PR sculpting and nofollow PR leak part to this debate. Even nofollow links can hurt if they are pointing to bad neighborhood.
I moderate comments on my blog with a tight fist and though I use dofollow plug-in, I don’t like keywords in Name field.
Good point, Jeet. Google does follow nofollow links, therefore those links are subject to the same warnings that dofollow links are subject to. Just because you add a nofollow attribute to a link doesn’t mean any search engine obligated to obey that command – and some don’t.
Hm, hard to say. I have seen many spammed pages with good PR and high search engine ranking.
~makarska
Spam comments obviously can’t help, but I’ve been thinking about something a little bit different. What happens if someone adds spam comments and links to your site with spam keywords? I think this hurts sites rating badly. How to defend from this way of “SEO attack”? It appears to me that the victim can only watch how the site goes down.