If you currently operate a blog as part of your small business inbound marketing strategy, chances are you have encountered a little – or a lot – of spam. It can be frustrating to have to spend your precious time moderating comments to determine which ones are spam and which ones are legit.
If you are currently receiving generic comments like “Great post. I was searching on Google for this info and I came across your website. My business does xyz, come check them out”? and other overly generic comments , odds are that spammers are employing your website to build backlinks to their sites.
First, I’ll discuss why comment spam is bad, then I’ll give you some advice on how to identify spam comments before I explain how to manage them.
[heading type=1]Why Comment Spam is Bad[/heading]
Some folks, in an effort to inflate their amount of comments, will believe it’s OK to approve comments they feel might not really be legit. What’s the damage in doing this? Consider these things:
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- Google is cracking down on links. This doesn’t only pertain to the websites that buy links, but the websites that enable them. The final thing you’d need is for Google to believe you’re allowing poor links on your site, even if they’re merely in the remarks.
- Comment spam shows lack of temperance. Imagine you’re about to purchase a house. You’re driving through a neighborhood where most of the yards are overgrown, some of the fences are covered in graffiti, and the posts are littered with junk – signs that no one is actively taking care of it. It’s the same belief your visitors will have of your site.
- Spam comments may cause you to lose your valuable audience. Image a scenario where a devoted reader goes through your posts and decides to click one of the links in a crap comment. On clicking, the reader ends up in the low value that is supplied by a total unrelated site. What will the reader think of the site? You do not want your business blogging exertions to go to waste or perhaps to lose your audience’s trust by allowing spam comments in your site.
- Your readers might lose confidence in your business. What if a reader clicks on a link to a different opinion author’s site and is taken somewhere they don’t need to be? This will annoy them in such a way that may cause them to loose interest in your business altogether. In cases where you wouldn’t link to a site in your content, you shouldn’t let someone link to it in their comments.
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[heading type=1]How to Spot Possible Spam Comments[/heading]
How do you know if a comment is junk or legit? It’s a difficult job. Many bloggers decide to count on their own opinions and go through them one by one to ascertain their authenticity. Moderating each of the opinions can be challenging, and for those who have a popular site, it can also be extremely time consuming, but, as mentioned above, there is a strong argument for taking the time to do so.
Here are some signs of potential spam comments:
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- Author using keywords instead of actual name. SEO spammers generally need to get link juice from your website and can use their target keywords rather than their real names when they register to make a comment.
- Author linking to unrelated website in the comment. Some spammers will leave comments that are not related to your post, and then link back to an unrelated site. Why should someone link to your website about superior cigars?
- Author using blacklisted e-mail domains. Remarks made by users who’ve registered with emails with questionable domain name extension are usually junk. This is a listing of common e-mail domain name extensions used for spamming.
- Author leaving common comments. If you’re starting out your website, you might acquire some flattering remark about how “nicely designed and quickly” your website is. All these are generally spammers trying to find simple links to their sites.
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[heading type=1]What to Do with Spam Comments[/heading]
The clearest thing to do with junk comments would be to delete them. If your comment isn’t adding value to readers, is off-subject or the writer is just writing something generic for the benefit of having a backlink, delete it.
Another alternative would be to moderate your opinions. Moderating will ensure that only pertinent comments appear on your own company site. You can check things like typos and make certain the comments don’t go against your website’s comment policy. For example, that you don’t need a remark that appears to assault a target group of individuals appearing on your own website. Such a remark can inhibit your business blogging efforts.
At times, spammers will make remarks that are related to your post but still use their target keywords in the author area to get SEO juice to their sites. In such an example, it’s up to you to determine whether or not to let their comment be posted on your blog.
The best method to find out whether to approve a comment would be to concentrate on value; will your audience get any value from the comment? Delete the comment when they won’t.
Blogging is a vital section of small business inbound marketing but can be hurt by junk. How are you managing spam in your website?
Why do some moderated sites allow blogspam? Doesn’t the damage caused by alienating actual readers, if there are any, outweigh the benefit of having a dozen “comments” by sites selling knock-off handbags? For my amusement, I googled one blogspam sent to my site, found another site that had posted that blogspam, and left my own comment, pointing out the blogspam. The moderator disallowed my comment, but left all of the actual blogspam. I found this amusing, but it does make me wonder why some moderators welcome blogspam.
That’s an interesting question. I assume they are hoping that no one else will notice that their comments are spam, or maybe they are hoping that people see the number and don’t actually read the comments. Either way it looks unprofessional to those of us that notice.
Thank you for your feedback!
Thanks, Mia. I’m not so sure that sites hope the blogspam will be taken for legitimate praise, especially when the “author” is something like “Viagra discounter,” and when some of the comments are just a long list of links. You might find it interesting that one site I found suggests not deleting any blogspam that might pass as legitimate (“Great site! Cheers!”), but suggests eliminating the links to avoid rewarding the blogspammer, and changing the author name if it reveals the comment to be blogspam. You might know the answer to this question: does the number of comments on a blog improve that site’s search engine ranking? I believe that I read somewhere that Google has a program, efficient or not, to recognize and not count blogpam.
Thanks again for your feedback, I definitely think that if you have the time and resources to eliminate the link and change the author name, allowing the comment might be beneficial to your blog, assuming the comment is relevant and not riddled with typos. To answer your question, the actual number of comments might not directly improve your rankings but the more comments you have, the more likely you are engaging your audience and adding to the conversation only boosts your content quality, thus leading to better rankings and more traffic. Comments can also help your rankings in a more direct way if they happen to include long-tail keywords.
I haven’t heard of Google’s program to identify spam comments, but I do know that links to irrelevant websites can factor into your Pagerank, so you should always be aware of what links you are allowing.