SEO Lesson of the Day: 3 Reasons Why Spam Comments and Pingbacks Can Hurt Your Search Engine Marketing

treatmentspecialist

August 7th, 2009
by treatmentspecialist

Eliminating Spam comments and pingbacks from your site is good for SEO.

Eliminating Spam comments and pingbacks from your site is good for SEO.

To me Spam is like obscenity: I know it when I see it.

And lately, as a blogger I’ve been seeing a deluge of Spam pingbacks in my moderation queue. You’ve probably seen them too. These are comments you receive from other sites that point back to your post with references to “see original post,” “read the rest here,” or “view the post.”

So what to do – approve or not approve? They seem harmless and you want people to comment on your blog. And all these are third party links back to your site so it’s all good, right?

WRONG! Spam pingbacks are harmful to your site’s SEO!

Welcome to the world of pingback spam. Sure, these comments aren’t incredibly constructive or insightful but the worst part about them is that they seem innocuous on the surface. However, publishing them to your blog could be harmful to your search engine marketing.

Pingback spam may not be as obvious and offensive as the spam that we’re used to seeing (like the hundreds of spam emails you’ve received over your lifetime from Cialis or Pedi Paws), however, they need to be blocked just the same.

So thanks to Akismet for this great primer: Eliminating SPAM is good SEO.

Akismet provides 3 reasons why your should NOT publish SPAM comments:

1. You are undermining your site’s SEO and diluting your “Google juice”

The spammer’s web site employs black-hat SEO tactics and spam methods to build backlinks from anywhere he can find them, including some of the web’s worst neighborhoods. By regularly publishing links to spammers’ web sites, you’re giving Google and other search engines a hint that links from your blog are poor quality. Additionally, by helping to validate a spam site, you are also inadvertently weakening the value of each of the other links from your blog.

2. You are attracting more spammers.

Spammers deliberately seek out blogs that other spammers have successfully spammed, because they know they are easy targets where future spam is more likely to be approved. Additionally, some blog applications like WordPress will automatically approve comments from regular users who have had at least one comment approved, automatically skipping the moderation process. Spammers know this and will often link to a harmless looking site in their first comment (or include no link at all), but link to progressively more blatant spam in subsequent comments.

3. You are damaging your site’s reputation.

You might not click on the links in all the comments on your blog, but some of your readers will. And some of those links will go to sites that are sleazy, offensive, or harmful. If you do publish spam comments on your blog, you might discover later that thousands of other blogs and forums have been spammed with links to your blog.

For more great SEO tips and healthy marketing advice, follow me on Twitter @my_dog_ate_it

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Comments:

  1. seo company
    (August 13th, 2009 at 8:06 pm)

    I never that spam comments could hut your seo campaign, l work for an seo company and never knew this thanks for the update

  2. Emilia Doerr
    (August 13th, 2009 at 9:15 pm)

    Thanks for your comment! I do think that eliminating spam pingbacks is a lesser known and/or talked about search engine marketing tactic – which makes bloggers even more vulnerable to approving pingback spam that could hurt their SEO.

  3. Stephanie Young
    (April 10th, 2010 at 3:12 pm)

    This is such good info. I’m going back through my blog comments now to look for spammers! Thanks for sharing this.

  4. Stephanie Young
    (April 10th, 2010 at 3:14 pm)

    What about Topsy.com?

  5. Lorrie Thomas

    Lorrie Thomas
    (April 12th, 2010 at 12:12 pm)

    Hi Stephanie! http://topsy.com/, a search engine powered by Tweets is an interesting concept and great if you want to see search results HEAVILY skewed by social media. I am still a die-hard Google search results groupie and WMT focuses our SEO efforts on search overall….-L

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