Be Very Careful With Blog Comment Spam (Inside and Outside Your Blog)

If you thought that spammy links on your comment section were not a big deal, well, think again. The official Google Webmaster Central blog published an article last week talking about this issue. Here is a quote from it:

Comments can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site’s users in discussions. This valuable content should not be replaced by gibberish nonsense keywords and links. For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

Disallow anonymous posting.

Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.

Turn on comment moderation.

Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.

Disallow hyperlinks in comments.

Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

The article also warns against using blog comments as a link building strategy, which probably means that Google is scrutinizing more closely the links posted in blog comments now. This means one thing: posting hundreds of comments (either on dofollow or nofollow blogs) with tailored keywords would probably be a good idea, as it could get your site flagged for manipulative behavior.