Blog Spamming
If you are the administrator of a blog, you will doubtless be familiar with receiving a fair quantity of spam on a daily basis. Many of the comments would nearly make you think that they were left specifically by people who had read your blog. Closer inspection will however, show that the comments are usually generic and/or with the title of your blog and/or post inserted into the body of the spam comment. For someone new to blog maintenance, they may be fooled into believing that the comment was a genuine one. The danger here is that they will permit its inclusion in their blog and subsequently provide the spammer with an inevitable backlink to the spamming site. This will also have the effect of reducing the blog owners page’s PR weighting for valid links (PR is distributed amongst outgoing links evenly, therefore 2 links from a PR2 page, would carry more significance to Google than 3 links from the same page - do you really want some of your PR value being diverted to a spammers website?).
How to cope with this is not that difficult. Some bloggers refuse to accept comments at all. I find this approach a bit drastic. One way is to not publish a comment until it has been verified by the administrator, which is something your blog software can help you with by automatically temporarily storing these comments, awaiting for your approval/rejection. If you are unsure of the validity of the source of a comment, you can always remove the web address they invariably add to their post, hence depriving them of the valuable backlink to their site. If I am unsure, I take a sizeable portion of the comment text which looks generic, i.e. without any reference to my site or post title, and then I Google it to see if a similar comment is published elsewhere on other blogs. If so, I delete the post.
Many bloggers who wish to have a successful site and are novices in SEO, may feel that ‘Content is King’ and accept any and all blog comments. This is a dangerous strategy, as usually the comments from spammers are already on other sites and hence would be deemed by Google as duplicate content. As well as that the backlink to the spamming site can influence how Google views your site. Link to a bad neighbourhood and you may be ‘tarred with the same brush’ by Google, i.e. they will assume you are no different from the spammers they are trying to crack down on. This could seriously damage your site’s reputation in the Google index and once damaged, it is very hard to repair. So take the time and perform careful routine maintenance on your blog’s comment… it could mean the difference between a successful blog and a sand-boxed one.