ELWsoftware.com

Yesterday I wrote about the changes I believe are taking place in 2010 in Googles search results ranking algorithm.  These improvements are more of an observation of where computer science can take search, and SEO.  I’ll summarize the new improvements in one sentence: Spam is no longer effective. As anybody with a decent blog knows, “people” leave comments on the articles you write that only seem to serve themselves.  At ELW, we receive an endless stream of comments, and nearly all of them are spam.  What does having an endless stream of bad comments on your blog do to your search engine rankings?

WordPress comment spam can be a big problem, but it doesn’t need to be.  The Akismet plugin does a great job of removing spam so that you don’t have to manually label dozens of comments as spam every morning.  If you are actually allowing comments without authorization, I pity you.

Observations on the SEO implications of comment spam:

1. If you are one of the fools actually using comment spam to promote your website, get prepared for some serious pain.  I know it sounds like a cool idea to run a program that will get you thousands of inbound links overnight, but how well does it really work?  To get a thousand real links, you probably need 100k or more comments to get some spam filters.  This means that at least 100 people see your site as spam for every link you get.  This could get the spammers’ sites blacklisted very quickly.
2. If you allow one spam comment on your WordPress blog, you will get hundreds or thousands more.  Some spam filters allow new comments from those who have existing approved posts.  Some spammers exploit this by sending innocent comments without links.  If you approve them, then they start the real spam.  Having spam on your blog can only hurt your search engine rankings.
3. I suggest disallowing any comment that doesn’t specifically talk about your article.  You should also avoid posting trackback or pingbacks with the [...] surrounding them.  These are useless to readers, and also used by spammers.  The idea is that you think you are obligated to post it because they gave you a link.  You aren’t! Do you want a bunch of inbound links from a spammer?  How much benefit do you think you will get from that?  Does anyone ever wake up in the morning and browse spam blogs to see if they linked to anything cool?

The only people receiving benefits from automated content spam are the people selling the software to do it.

After receiving this comment “Hey,mate.Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post.thanks for sharing this.” in our blog post about top ten reasons Google sucks, I decided to search for the term.

It is automatically generated spam comment to get a link to their page.

I won’t repeat the site they linked to for a number of reasons:

1. I don’t care about their site, and don’t think it is worthy of a link from anyone, especially on an article about the stupidity of Google’s operations.
2. My search for your comment showed that you post the exact same comment on tons of different blogs.  Is it the default post in some dumbass spam software you bought?
3. Other times the links were to other sites, under other names, selling some other crap.
4. Sometimes I just get motivated to do my own evil, and now you need to watch out.

So, the plan is the following:

1. If you found this post as the result of searching for the text of a blog comment, congratulations!
2. Don’t click on any link associated with this junk.
3. Consider ELW for your anti-spam terror-campaign.  We have extraordinary tracking capability and we know everything about any spammer that visits a site.
4. Even though we wish Google would change, we know how to use them to cause trouble for spammers also.

You see, if you catch a cheater cheating at some game, it won’t make them stop cheating.  You need to make the cheating less beneficial.  When spamming is no longer effective, it will stop.

If you get a comment on your blog like “Hey,mate.Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post.thanks for sharing this.”  Change the link to something else that won’t help the spammer.  I suggest changing the link to the URL for this post.