Comments on: Google Page level penalty for comment spam – rankings and traffic drop

By: Seo Optimization

Seo Optimization — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:09:25 +0000

how your page in SERP within 24 hours!!!!!!

great interesting read. Thankz

By: Seo Trends

Seo Trends — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:24:19 +0000

Great review. thanks for sharing this very forwarded idea.i use twitter only for this. search engine marketing tips´s last blog.

By: Fargham

Fargham — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:04:43 +0000

quite interesting, but congrat. you got traffic back

By: Maqbool Ahmad

Maqbool Ahmad — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:02:51 +0000

Very well written. This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s. Keep up the good work.

By: Article Alley

Article Alley — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:28:19 +0000

I had a similar experience with a travel blog I ran – I found that if you don’t have the time to check things really really carefully its better to disable comments entirely – its so easy for this sort of thing to happen and for traffic to take a hit.

At least things bounced back and you spotted the issue.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:18:40 +0000

Interesting post, I didn’t really think about the negative effects of Comments on your sites SEO, however I agree with most people here that say it was a text filter.

Also search results can vary if a Data Center is having problems, sometimes searching the same keyword yeilds different results because it depends on which data center you’re hitting. I’d say it was the words (Which I’ll omit) ticking off the safe filter.
This makes me want to write about it myself on http://green.cx but I think I’ll just link you instead! You did such a good and through writeup!

By: SEOPlay

SEOPlay — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:27:51 +0000

Excellent job paying close attention to your traffic. Even better job communicating this information in a clear, concise manner. Makes me worry about massive comments and the time necessary to manage them all.

By: John Rothko

John Rothko — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:23:20 +0000

Since you have to check your comments anyway to filter out the bad ones, I do not see why moderating them upfront would be a problem. Especially blogs with open commenting are prone to be misused by spammers and now that they have find you out, you are going to have to monitor your comments very closely from now on. Therefore, I think IBL builder has point although he puts it rather bluntly.
But I understand where you come from, moderating conversations doesn’t work encouraging, that is absolutely true.
However, you can get around this problem by allowing trusted commenters to publish automatically. There is a setting for it this. In other words: if you have approved a comment for the first time, the commenter will then be able to comment next time without the need for approval. Secondly, you can filter comments that have more then one link. That’s another firewall for spam.
Hope this helps?

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:51:33 +0000

@IBL builder

I recieve a lot of comments. I would never be able to manually moderate them all, not to mention the fact that comments moderatated tend to extinguish conversation between commenters. It’s not “naive” to allow comments on a blog, it’s intentional.

By: IBL Builder

IBL Builder — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:51:04 +0000

Am I alone in thinking “so what”. If you are naive enough in this day and age to allow comments onto your blog without moderation, then why would you be surprised by Google’s response when they find them?

By: John Rothko

John Rothko — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:09:36 +0000

Askimet works with a list of known spam messages. In that sense it is perfect, but you cannot do anything against a person who fills in a spam message by hand.
But it is a lot less, and I mean really a lot less then without the protection from Askimet, so I would donate some money towards those guys as they really do a good job.

By: Marie

Marie — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 06:12:24 +0000

wow.. nice post. I thought akismet is close to perfection. huhuhu.. i learned a lot, comments do affect rankings. thank u!!

By: John Rothko

John Rothko — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:26:57 +0000

Sorry, I meant to say that it is not abnormal that some spam escapes Askimet

By: John Rothko

John Rothko — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:25:42 +0000

I have my comments set to approval before they are published, so this sort of problem won’t happen to me. Indeed, there are actually quite a few spam comments that escape Askimet and that is not normal, automation only goes up to a point.
Thanks for the insight. I didn’t know it would affect a site so fast.
Keep up the good work

By: Seo In Abruzzo

Seo In Abruzzo — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:43:43 +0000

Nice post. Interesting, but not sure that a bunch of comment can attract the attenction of Google penalty system.
I’ve a site of a company who I manage that seems page level penalized, and it’s a standard plain html web site, without comment, so the reason must be searched somewhere else.

By: twitrounds

twitrounds — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:47:27 +0000

Great post! We allow comments on our site and it’s good to look out for this stuff. Fortunately we don’t allow comments to be posted without approval so hopefully we never run into this problem!

By: DennisG

DennisG — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:33:35 +0000

Really interesting stuff.
I really hate those comment spammers, and I always make sure all posts are closed when I have no way of moderating the comments while I’m kicking it on the beach. But it makes me sad that my readers don’t have the chance of interacting with me while I’m sipping on a cocktail.

Thanks for sharing this. Very helpful

Dennis

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:06:19 +0000

@Wiep Hello mate. Actually Will at Distilled said the same thing last night. As far as the totally different rankings go, perhaps a possible indicator of how a shorter term index may be deployed in case the main index changes unexpectedly when a penalty occurs?

By: Cassiano Travareli

Cassiano Travareli — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:59:57 +0000

Really Interesting this post.

It´s a flag to pay more attention in the comment links, mainly after the changes on nofollow rules.

By: Wiep

Wiep — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:48:24 +0000

I tend to agree with Tonnie here – it looks a bit like a text filter. I know it’s too late now, but I’d like to know if your website would show up with SafeSearch turned off…

Also, the complete top 4 for ‘virtualbox guest additions’ is different in both screen shots. Could you think of an explanation for this?