Google Cracks Down On Comment Spammers

Has your website or blog ever been a victim of comment spam?  We’ve all seen them – Spammers and bots running through websites leaving as many flooded back-links as they possibly can to send people to their site and increase their page rank.

Google recently posted on their blog explaining that they are not unaware of the situation, and have taken steps through their page-ranking system/algorithms to ensure “We won’t up-rank spammers.” Result?  Comment spam no longer increases page rank on the Google search results for spammers, and the same goes for member and group name spam.

Hopefully, the spammers get the message and read this because nothing is more annoying than Comment Spam!  After all, the purpose of the comment system is to provide site visitors a place to post feedback and useful information.  Yes, to actually ENHANCE the post.  Unfortunately, Comment Spam can quickly deteriorate not only the quality of the post but the overall reputability of the website itself, often misleading unsuspecting visitors to scams or spam sites.

SPAM is nothing new for most of us.  Anyone who has an email address is most likely familiar with the email version of spam, and if you don’t have a good spam filter set up it will overwhelm you.  The image below is an example of Yahoo spammed by abuse of the Groups feature:

Fortunately, as mentioned above, Google provides some incentives NOT to comment spam.  According to the Google Webmaster team:

Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.

Failure to adhere to the Google Guidelines regarding spam can result in the spammer’s site removal from the Google search results.  YEAH!!  :)

Not sure if your comments are spam or not?  Google explains in detail what a “spammy” link is here.

If you feel that you may be guilty of spam, it’s not too late.  Contact the webmasters of your victim sites and ask them to please remove your spam comments.  If you’ve already suffered penalization for such behavior by Google, you can apply for reconsideration to have your site added back to their search results.  Just remember to fix EVERYTHING according to the Google guidelines before requesting reconsideration.

Hard facts about comment spam [via theGoogleOs]