I currently have an auto pilot wordpress blog. Daily I see that my comments section on posts are getting a lot of spam comments with links to others websites ect....I currently have a plugin that removes all the spam. My question is should I leave that spam out there? Does it hurt or help my SEO?
I would like to know this too. Typically I'll just edit the spammer's comments or delete them, so I am curious if leaving them they way they are can impact anything.
Linking to sites in a "bad neighborhood" is not a good thing but on target comments help a lot. Spammer rarely leave on topic comments. If its got a link and it isn't on topic, kill it. That's what I do. I also use a plugin that requires people to verify their email address if a comment is held for moderation. I then require all commenters to have one pre approved post. If they verify their email, the comment is auto approved. This takes care of more than 95% of stupid unrelated comment spam. Allowing a blogger to include his link in return for a comment related to the post is how I make this decision.
Say I edit their comment in order to suit my blog. Is that worth it, or is that some kind of black-hat SEO? (I remove all of the links btw..)
I would remove the spam comments. There have been recent hints from Google that they are now looking at the quality of comments on a site, and typically spam comments are low quality, so it is best to just remove them rather than trying to edit them. Also the spam comments do not bring any value to your site, particularly if you allow them to link out to their site with a dofollow link it could hurt your site. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-forums-blog-spelling-13506.html
I would get rid of the spam if I were you. They do not help with your SEO (in fact, they can hurt your ranking or pull your site down) and only distract your visitors. Moderating comments that come in your blog shows readers you 100% in maintaining the quality of your blog.
Why don't you install reCAPTCHA plugin for your blog // and make users login to be able to leave a comment. spam comments never help to ur site seo . becoz inbound links and outbound links may be equal in optimized site.
Spammers never brings any benefit for the webmasters. Sometimes they be the cause of harm for the site. You may make your site NoFollow, then the flow of spammer will be less.
I myself don't use any plugin for spam removal as such tools can make mistakes and remove real comments. So what I do is whenever I see repetitive comments with spam from the same source, I put the IP of that user/bot into the blacklist and the comments are automatically put in the spam folder.
comment spam should be removed. The spammers can google their own comment content to find out where it's being left up.
Just keep removing them. You can only approve your blog's topic related comments (if any). It will be helpful
Clemetool, I think your time would be better spent creating fake accounts to comment on your blog than editing others. I wouldn't do either. Some of the spam tools actually recored if the comment was approved or not. I watched a video of some SEO product. If they see the comment approved it is often shared with other comment spammers on the network and then the spam comments really rolled in and they can hurt your sites performance. I have a site that gets over 500 spam comments a day. I approved a few "hey wonderful site" and when I did boom! The started pouring in after that. I'd spend the time on SEO and specifically backlinks than wasting my time with spammers. Get the traffic, the comments will come.
I have the traffic, but rarely it converts for the better. I've removed all of the spammy comments and have the ones where people genuinely contributed. Thanks.