September 10, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Comment Spam tends to be an issue for any site that allows users to leave comments on articles or content. As anyone with a blog will know, message boards tend to be awash with fake comments, often in Pigeon English. These are not designed to add to the debate really, they’re basically just ways of getting a link to an external site onto a website. In fact, they’re often not even done by people, with a lot of comment spam coming from custom designed bots.
This might sound like a harmless annoyance, though it can have serious negative effects on your site. The first, and most important one, is PageRank. Unfortunately, it seems Google does penalise the PageRank of blog posts that have ‘spammy’ comments. This is particularly annoying as spammers will, of course, target the highest PageRank areas of the site and therefore affect the most useful blog posts.
The good news is that this penalty is usually easily reversed once you delete the offending posts. So a good way to combat the negative effects of comment spam is to have someone on staff whose job it is to monitor the comments on the site regularly. In addition to this, there are great tools out there like Aksimet that allow you to catch the spambots in the act. However, this is not a substitute for a human moderator.
The simple fact is that if you have comments you have to have regular oversight of those comments.
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