Does Google Penalize Sites on Comment Spam Blacklists? And Is Your Blog Commenting...

Does Google Penalize Sites on Comment Spam Blacklists?
(And Is Your Blog Commenting Strategy Devaluing Your Website?)

I source I trust who is close to Google and really knows his stuff (someone who can game Google with ease, has friends at Google, and has worked with many successful online start-ups) told me that Google has access to data on comment spam blacklists.

So if a particular domain spams a lot of blogs in the comment section, and they report it as spam to a central database (such as Akismet) then Google will find out about it and devalue the spammer's domain.

In other words if you spam lots of blogs, it is going to harm your site's rankings.

I've seen circumstantial evidence this is true, but can't confirm it.

Has anyone else found evidence for this or heard anything similar?

Personally I don't recommend mass blog commenting anyway, but I know its a popular strategy.

 

I have seen some blogs that have literally been disgraced by spam comments, almost to the point where I start laughing it is so bad. I usually walk away from those posts as I have heard and read about the same thing you are talking about. Not to put any value in it, but Matt Cutts did a video about this, where basically, if a blog had 200 comments. You had one of them. The weight in the backlink from that blog that links back to your website, would be valued less than a blog where there were only 10 comments. Seemed logical and made sense to me. Today, I still get a email from a blog I commented on 2 yrs ago saying, so and so left a comment. I bet you there have been 100 or more of these emails from that blog, and I still get a pit in my stomach everytime I get that email for the reason you are explaining above.

 

I think it's unlikely Google penalizes sites with lots of backlinks from blog comments but Google may well discount or devalue the juice given by mass blog commenting in order to devalue spamming as a way of improving SERPs performance.

 

No... I don't think so.

 

according to me interesting comments never effect SERP

 

I don't think so either, because with the tools available nowadays, it would be too easy to dump a competitor in the doodoo. the prev poster is right though, devaluation of backlinks does happen.

 

Ask a question: What if:

What if a website has all back links from spam comments?
What if a website has many other back links but also some spam comments?

Then ask another what if:

What if spam comments will take down a website, will you do if free for your competitors?

 

thats right

 

if you are commenting on spam site then definitely it will effect your SERP

 

For reasons like these, I do not approve most comments on my blog. I do not want Google to devalue my site.

Google may devalue the links, and they may also devalue the blog that allows a lot of comments to low quality and spammy sites.

They may not punish the site getting the links from comments (as anyone can use this to hurt their competitors) BUT they can definitely punish the site linking out. The site needs to take responsibility and it's within their control.

That is why Ezine Articles gets a lot of Google love compared to Goarticles. The former moderates their articles, the latter does not.

 

I think I have not explained this clearly enough. It's not to do with the backlinks from comments, it is to do with your domain being put in comment spam blacklists, and Google has access to those blacklists so knows who has been spamming blogs with comments.

So the theory is IF you are are on a comment blacklist (so when you comment on a Wordpress blog and the spam software automatically deletes it because your domain is blacklisted in a central database) then Google knows your domain is on a blacklist and penalizes you in some way for it.

 

If what you say is true, then it will be too easy to blacklist our competitors. There are softwares out there which can automatically posts thousands of comments in a few hours. Just run them for a night and boom your competitors domain is devalued

 

I really don't think so...

Cheers!

 

It is possible but it is not quite as simple as that. Newer low authority sites are most vulnerable,. Bigger, older and more popular sites are practically immune (but not entirely).

There are actually businesses out there which specialize in this. They often are known as 'reputation management'.

 

Why would Akismet keep them immune if they are spamming blog comments?

 

I doubt it would hurt you, Mr G will just not count those links

 

It is not being immune from a spam filter like Akismet, it is being practically immune from an algorithmic penalization that could be caused by being on a comment spam blacklist (assuming Google does actually have such info and uses it).

What it boils down to is the bigger the site the more it can do wrong before it will get penalized, the reason being it hurts Google not to have a popular site appearing in its results.

 

Spamming in any nature or field is hated by Google..
To my knowledge, comment spamming is one of those.

 

Your theory has too many assumptions

 

Google always hate doing spam. So black hat is always danger