Comment spam refers to the irrelevant comments along with a link to the website for getting traffic. Mostly automated bots who comment leave these comments randomly on websites in order to get a backlink to the blog mentioned while commenting. Some bloggers add spam comments when they leave short and irrelevant comments and add a link to their website. Comment spam is present everywhere and affects the blog adversely.
Effects of spam comments
1. It affects quality of your blog
Spam comments reduces the quality of your blog. After reading the blog, readers are likely to read the comments to the blog post in order to read user opinions. If your blog is full of spam comments that do not add anything to the content of your blog, readers are likely to get annoyed and leave the blog quickly. The reason behind people leaving the blog quickly after reading comments being that links posted in comments could be spam or malware links.
2. It Has negative impact on your blog in the long run
Reputation of the bloggers suffers a setback by spam comments and it has a long-term impact on the blog. New readers may believe that blogger is endorsing the links in the comments. Some of the links can be to sites that you never visited and frauds. Visitors may never come back to your blog if they see the same thing happening on all your blog posts. This will affect the site traffic and readership in the end.
3. It affects SEO on your blog
Comment spam reduces the search engine rankings of a website and places your blog in the warning zone. Your blog comments are part of your content as it comes to determining search engine placement. A site with lot of spam comments will be termed a malicious website and Google displays a warning to all the users accessing your website from Google search results. The warning may not be easy to remove unless you remove all the spam comments on your website. This will affect the site rankings and reduces the overall traffic to your blog. It is not easy to fix and achieve the same rankings before Google penalty.
4. It affects blogging community
Blogging is a community that needs protection in order to benefit the society. You can protect the blogging community by fighting against the spam. Never allow blog spam comments on your blog. Spammers are using dead blogs to leave comments and increase their search engine rankings. It is important to help Google display relevant search results to users by disallowing spam comments on your blog.
In order to combat comment spam you need to turn on the comment moderation. Moderating comments can be a challenging task if you are receiving hundreds of comments daily. In WordPress hosted blogs, you can turn on the Akismet plugin to help you filter out the spam comments from the real ones.
Some commenters can truly add value to your blog post. It is necessary to the encourage comments on your blog and at the same time discourage people from posting spam comments. How do you combat spam comments on your blog? Please share your experience with spam commenters on your blog.
