Preventing Comment Spam

Preventing comment spam or using it to boost your on-page SEO; which one is it going to be?

(hint: you can do one or the other)

I just got an email asking about preventing comment spam on a WordPress blog.

I’m lazy, so rather than paraphrase my reply, I’ll just paste what I wrote back (I’m omitting the the sender’s name)

Using Others’ Comment Spam To Boost Your Rankings

“Hey there, (name omitted)

Yup, that’s spam, all right…

When it comes down to on-page SEO, there are several things that get you Google juice. By now you probably know all about keywords in URLs, Title tags, meta descriptions, etc…

But one thing you and I never discussed is incoming links (links from other sites). When you get a link from, say, hubpages.com coming to your site, in Google’s eyes, that’s basically like someone else saying your site is ‘spongeworthy’ (if you weren’t a Seinfeld fan, that means very valuable)

And if the link comes from a relevant authority site, that’s like having Seinfeld himself say your site is cool (and if the link itself is a relevant keyword, that’s as if he said it while being a guest on Oprah).

So, blog spammers use comment-spamming bots to seek out any WordPress blog and post a fake comment in order to obtain a backlink.

comment spam bot Now, the rule when spamming blogs is to try to keep the blog moderator (you) from deleting the comment (and therefore a link), so they’ll typically try to post a compliment of some kind.

Bust since they’re using spamming bots to send out a comment to hundreds, or even thousands of blogs, they have no way of customizing the comment to what you’re actually talking about, so they make it as broad and vague as they can

And THAT is how you can tell if the comments marked as spam really are spam

Now, your site was built to automatically turn each outgoing link into a ‘nofollow’ link, so their comments aren’t leaching much Google juice from your site. So even if your spam tool didn’t catch the comments, they wouldn’t be getting much juice from you anyway.

But how do you turn spam to your advantage?

Google likes content. Better yet, it likes frequently updated content.

When you get a comment on your page – that, in effect, is an update to the entire page. If Google sees new comments every time it crawls your site, it comes back for more, and it does it more and more frequently.

Now, the last thing you wanna do is turn off your Akismet and let all the spam get through. Comment spam doesn’t provide a value to your readers, and it – well, it looks spammy.

So this is what you do: quickly scan through your comments, and find a few that are ‘almost spongeworthy’.

The first step is to approve them.

That solidifies an entry in your logs showing where the comment came from (meaning it shows you didn’t create a comment yourself)

Then tweak it. Get rid of the link to their site. Add a little value to their comment and (if you can) use a keyword or a semantically related phrase. Then update the comment, and voila – you have updated your page with more relevant content, and it only took you a second.

Unethical? Hey – those dirty buggers spammed YOU; never forget that!

Of course, never do this to someone who provided REAL value. If someone actually commented on something you wrote and placed a link to their site, let them keep it. I don’t consider that spam.”

Now, some of you probably don’t have the time for that, so, here is the alternative