Comment spamming advice just posted from Google:

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

One of the reasons I moderate all comments, and use a custom wordpress comments plugin so only returning visitors get a search engine friendly link.

It’s probably kind of easy for Google to spot comments on blogs.

On first crawl, it gets the fresh page, second, the page with some comment links, third, more comment links (Google does seem to have a long memory). Probably easy to devalue comments even without knowing the system involved.

If you are going to comment, probably best to get in early, and keep it intelligent.

It seems to be getting more and more these days Google is actually telling US (you and me) to clean up OUR existing link profile.

I wonder if this failure to do so will feature more heavily in the 2010 algorithm, in terms of your own site rankings.

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you’ve cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

The question is of course… why bother? I don’t see anything on that post that mentions penalties. And of course, if there was, you could just mass spam blogs to take out your competitors.

posting tons of links that point back to the poster’s site in an attempt to boost their site’s ranking

Ah, Google means…. tons. Mass spamming, cross scripting then?

Yeah no wonder Google is posting this I am watching a well known SEO company in England cross script a popular comments plugin for a client, just in time for Christmas – it’s working too.

The odd link shouldn’t be a problem then?

Others might tweak this approach a bit by posting a generic comment (like “Nice site!”) with a commercial user name linking to their site.

Has Google got a range of crappy comment types it’s going to start trying to find? That would actually be sweet lol.

But it’s kind of vague. Who’s blog is getting nuked? The blog the comments are on, or the site the comments point to?

For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

  • Disallow anonymous posting.
  • Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
  • Turn on comment moderation.
  • Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
  • Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
  • Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

Above, I’ve bolded the one thing you actually need to stop comment spammers.

Comment spammers are a pain – why I outed one, but this post doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know….

Block comments pages using Robots.txt?

Not likely.

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)