Identifying and Managing Spam Comments

If you currently operate a blog as part of your small business inbound marketing strategy, chances are you have encountered a little – or a lot – of spam. It can be frustrating to have to spend your precious time moderating comments to determine which ones are spam and which ones are legit.

If you are currently receiving generic comments like “Great post. I was searching on Google for this info and I came across your website. My business does xyz, come check them out”? and other overly generic comments , odds are that spammers are employing your website to build backlinks to their sites.

First, I’ll discuss why comment spam is bad, then I’ll give you some advice on how to identify spam comments before I explain how to manage them.

Why Comment Spam is Bad

Some folks, in an effort to inflate their amount of comments, will believe it’s OK to approve comments they feel might not really be legit. What’s the damage in doing this? Consider these things:

How to Spot Possible Spam Comments

How do you know if a comment is junk or legit? It’s a difficult job. Many bloggers decide to count on their own opinions  and go through them one by one to ascertain their authenticity. Moderating each of the opinions can be challenging, and for those who have a popular site, it can also be extremely time consuming, but, as mentioned above, there is a strong argument for taking the time to do so. 

Here are some signs of potential spam comments:

• Google is cracking down on links. This doesn’t only pertain to the websites that buy links, but the websites that enable them. The final thing you’d need is for Google to believe you’re allowing poor links on your site, even if they’re merely in the remarks.
• Comment spam shows lack of temperance. Imagine you’re about to purchase a house. You’re driving through a neighborhood where most of the yards are overgrown, some of the fences are covered in graffiti, and the posts are littered with junk – signs that no one is actively taking care of it. It’s the same belief your visitors will have of your site.
• Spam comments may cause you to lose your valuable audience. Image a scenario where a devoted reader goes through your posts and decides to click one of the links in a crap comment. On clicking, the reader ends up in the low value that is supplied by a total unrelated site. What will the reader think of the site? You do not want your business blogging exertions to go to waste or perhaps to lose your audience’s trust by allowing spam comments in your site.
• Your readers might lose confidence in your business. What if a reader clicks on a link to a different opinion author’s site and is taken somewhere they don’t need to be? This will annoy them in such a way that may cause them to loose interest in your business altogether. In cases where you wouldn’t link to a site in your content, you shouldn’t let someone link to it in their comments.

What to Do with Spam Comments

The clearest thing to do with junk comments would be to delete them. If your comment isn’t adding value to readers, is off-subject or the writer is just writing something generic for the benefit of having a backlink, delete it.

Another alternative would be to moderate your opinions. Moderating will ensure that only pertinent comments appear on your own company site. You can check things like typos and make certain the comments don’t go against your website’s comment policy. For example, that you don’t need a remark that appears to assault a target group of individuals appearing on your own website. Such a remark can inhibit your business blogging efforts.

At times, spammers will make remarks that are related to your post but still use their target keywords in the author area to get SEO juice to their sites. In such an example, it’s up to you to determine whether or not to let their comment be posted on your blog.

The best method to find out whether to approve a comment would be to concentrate on value; will your audience get any value from the comment? Delete the comment when they won’t.

Blogging is a vital section of small business inbound marketing but can be hurt by junk engagement. How are you managing spam in your website?