The Google Webmaster Blog has this short post explaining how abusing sites’ comment fields by putting up comment containing links to the poster’s site can actually hurt both sites’ ranking. That is of course if the comments posted are actually not related to the post or gibberish. In short, non legit comments whose objective is to raise the poster’s site ranking. If you have done this before to boost your site’s ranking, and your site was penalized by Google. Here’s what you need to do.
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.
To avoid comment spam from hitting your sites, here are what you need to do:
- 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.
If you currently own a site with tons of comment spams hitting you daily, you can also follow those steps.
And here’s a reminder from Google that we all should have known by now – original content and some search engine-friendly optimization is still the best way to get a better site ranking on Google search, since the web community will only link to your site through your great content.
