Friday 13th – A Very Bad Day for Comment Spammers

Posted by Andy Beard on November 13th, 2009 No Comments Printer-Friendly

Nice search engine friendly links are a great way to reward valuable members of the community of any blog, but they are certainly not a right, and still find myself deleting 50+ worthless comments every day.

Most disturbing of all though are the SEO consultants and agencies who I have caught commenting on behalf of their clients, or as themselves with a link through to a client’s site. Some of them are totally dumb about it.

I now have a new comments policy in force though most of it is just a clearer interpretation of what has been in place for the last 3+ years.

Comment Policy Update: Nov 13th 2009 Keywords Etc

Looks like Friday 13th is a very bad day for comment spammers…

No more keywords within anchor text in the comment fields
No sig links under comments
Highly relevant links in the body of a comment can contain anchor text such as the blog title but they will be judged on a case by case basis.
Even after these changes, I still expect to delete 90% of human comments as the vast majority are just an attempt to get a link rather than adding real value to the conversation.
SEO Consultants/Agencies – If I catch you commenting but linking to a client’s site, your online reputation, your firm’s and that of your client are being put at severe risk.

My full comment policy

I should really do an update about Disqus, but we can save that for another day – I still haven’t found enough time to fully clean up the mess they left my comments in, and some things will never be recovered.

This is part of my cleanup for when the new FTC rules come into effect at the beginning of December, though effectively the new US rules aren’t any stricter than rules currently in Europe & UK.

Tags: blog comment spam, comment spam, comment-policy, dofollow, nofollow