Please Remove Spammy Comments From Your Articles: Your Pagerank Might Suffer

Today I went through some of my old articles at Triond. There were some comments on my article from a person I did not recognize, so I casually clicked on that name. It didn’t look a spammy comment; i.e, it did not seem to have links to any commercial web site as part of the comment. But to my horror, the link took me to a hard pornographic site! I wanted to delete that comment, but to do that I had to go through loads of comment screens from my dashboard. I had just written an article Why many of us have been barred by Google Adsense and I realized from my experience mentioned in that article that such links would affect my Page Rank. Not coincidentally, the article had not been indexed by Google.

That set me thinking.

Nowadays my articles (I hope yours too) do not get spammy comments. Similarly, there weren’t any spammy comments in 2008-2009. Most of these comments were in the period 2010-2011. Painfully, I deleted as many of the spammy comments as I could.

Now the question is, does it really matter? Does Google have any guidelines for this? The following lines are from Google help.

• Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:
  • Links intended to manipulate PageRank
  • Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
  • Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (”Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
  • Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

Read some more do’s and don’ts about Google Adsense that you must make sure to understand and implement.

Some of the spammers may leave behind certain bad keywords that are illegal in Google AdSense policies. The comment may not appear suspicious enough to make you want to remove them, but leaving them as-is may result in the removal of Google AdSense advertisements from your article because of inappropriate content, or getting banned from Google AdSense.

Always check the link associated with the commenter’s name. If you do not like the associated website, it is better to block the comment. Understand that a link in a comment is an outgoing link and retaining those comments just to increase their count may result in your being penalized for linking to sites that are against Google AdSense’s content guidelines.