Daniel Vaczi
Are you receiving generic comments like “Great post. I was searching on Google for this information and I came across your blog. My company does xyz, come check them out"? If a lot of the comments made are not related to your posts or are too generic, chances are that spammers are using your blog to build backlinks to their sites.
Spam comments not only suck “SEO juice” from your blog, but can also cause you to lose your valuable audience. Imagine a situation where a loyal reader is going through the comments and decides to click one of the links in a spam comment. On clicking, the reader ends up in a total unrelated site that provides low value. What will the reader think of your blog? You do not want your business blogging efforts to go to waste or to lose your audience’s trust by allowing spam comments on your blog.
How to Identify Possible Spam Comments
How do you know if a comment is spam or legit? It’s not an easy task. Some bloggers choose to put all comments on moderation and go through them one by one to determine their legitimacy. However, if you have a popular blog, moderating all the comments can be difficult and time consuming.
Here are some signs of possible spam comments:
- Author using keywords instead of real name. SEO spammers usually want to get link juice from your blog and will use their target keywords rather than their real names when they register to make a comment.
- Author linking to unrelated website in the comment. Some spammers will leave comments that are not related to your post, and then link back to an unrelated site. If your site is about home construction, why should someone link to a site about premium cigars?
- Author using blacklisted email domains. Comments made by users who have registered with emails with questionable domain name extension are usually spam. Here is a list of common email domain extensions used for spamming.
- Author leaving generic comments. If you are starting out your blog, you might get some flattering comment about how “nicely designed and fast” your site is. These are usually spammers looking for easy links to their sites.
Does any of the above sound familiar? We thought so.
What to do with Spam Comments
The most obvious thing to do with spam comments is to delete them. If a comment is not adding value to readers, is off-topic or the author is simply writing something generic for the sake of getting a backlink, delete it.
Another option is to moderate your comments. Moderating will ensure that only relevant comments appear on your business blog. You can check things like typos and ensure the comments don’t go against your blog’s comment policy. For example, you do not want a comment that seems to attack a target group of people appearing on your blog. Such a comment can inhibit your business blogging efforts.
Sometimes, spammers will make comments that are related to your post but still use their target keywords in the author field to get SEO juice to their sites. In such an instance, it is really up to you to decide whether or not to allow their comment.
The best way to determine whether to approve a comment is to focus on value; will your audience get any value from the comment? If they won't, delete the comment.
Business blogging in an important part of inbound marketing but can be hurt by spam. How are you managing spam on your blog?
