Spammers got my site penalized (lesson learned!)

This is exactly what happened to me. For the "keyword" I was in a given position for about 2 years. The only thing that has changed lately is that Google indexed those spammy comments. Otherwise the page has not changed at all. I suspect that the spammy comments were the cause - but after reading people's comments I accept that other things may have caused this - like Google changing its algorithms.
Anyway, the fact remains: the only on-page modification is the reported SPAM.

I think that the best thing to do is to wait for G to reindex the page without comments. If after this change I will be back in the SERP then I can safely draw the conclusion that the comments affected my page position.

Regards,
Razvan

 

keep us informed please...

 

And further to the point of moderation discouraging comments, If I went to a site and saw lots of Spam comments, I would think the blog owner either didn't care or wasn't serious and probably wouldn't bother leaving a comment myself.

You have to ask yourself if you are after quantity or quality with your comments.

 

What you are saying is not the issue here.

What's the issue is if ONE comment in ONE article in a personal (or not) blog, can get you penalised. Maybe the owner slipped that one. Or something like that.

I never took the assumption that the whole blog will be filled with spam comments, when i said that this fact would not penalise a website.

Just my 2 cents.

Off-course that if a Blog is filled with spammy comments, i would see that as untaken care of, or that the webmaster really doesn't care about it, or that it's just a farm. I totally agree with you Yfs.

 

Except as anyone knows if your blog is popular you may be getting 5-10 spam comments a day. If you aren't using moderation mode, you are bound to have those comments stay for a while each time (even if they aren't the same as the ones the visitor saw last time).

 

I have first time moderation, and after that if the user posts more than a link, again it's moderated, after that, comes the blacklist with stopwords.

 

In my case, like I said in my previous post, the SPAM account for 3-4 browser pages which is roughly equal with the amount of useful information.

First time moderation is effective but it requires that the user is logged in. On my website there is no need to be logged in - and I find that on many sites (especially small ones) this is overkill. People don't want to go thru the trouble of becoming a member just to leave a comment.
For sites for which the user is not authenticated, moderation sounds like a good choice.


Regards,
Razvan

 

Not really. Mine works without registering too, and i still have first time registering. Identifier is by name/IP/mail.

 

Is this efficient ? Do you care to say how many unique users per month you have for the site in question and how many spam comments escape thru your filters ?

With this system, it is easy to impersonate somebody else. From what you said on this thread I would say that the most efficient filter is the one regarding the number of links. Almost all spammers try to post multiple links.


Regards,
Razvan

 

Dude .. I am not Cutts to have 150 comments per article.

But all the spammy comments I got in www.seopedia.org, have been blocked. I mean ALL..

 

Thanks dude. I mean dooooood

 

Huh ? say that again.

 

I think dooooood may have been a Goooooogle joke...

But Expertu is basically right. The problem affecting how you rank is likely not comments per se but some combination of factors possibly including "safe filtering". What those other factors might be could perhaps be discerned if you provided the URL but since you won't do that we can only speculate.

Try a Google search with and without the "safe filter" on and see if your ranking changes.

 

Missed that one. Sorry

Basically, here is the safe search query :

Or just go to prefferences and enable safe search.

 

I never enable safe filtering.

I think that you all people got used into thinking in a certain way about SEO. When I am in doubt I try to think what a Google engineer would do. If I would be a Google engineer I would not give much credit to a site about - let's say programming - in which half the content speaks about phentermine, viagra etc. This was my case. The spammy comments were roughly equal in size with the useful content.


Regards,
Razvan

 

Hmm... you didn't get it. The joke is not that obvious so I will give you 1 week before revealing about what it was about.

Let's test the imagination of people from this forum!


Regards,
Razvan

Note:

I will give a clue each day until the week is over. (if it is the case)

 

Dude, we were telling you to check your website rannking using the safe mode, to see if your website has been affected by the safe filter.

Ok .. We have our own way.

We all got the right to free will. So knock yourself out

 

I am back in the SERPs and even more: my page is several positions up !

It looks like the people from this forum were right: the spammy comments didn't affect my rating. In fact, like I said my web page is several positions up.

This is unexpected - at least for me.



Regards,
Razvan

 

Well cheers for us

 

I feel pretty certain you could code a script that would automatically replace or delete specific words when submitted. Or even better, automatically refuse the submission. With a little imagination and the right substituitions the results could be quite entertaining for you and your surfers as well as frustrating for the spammers...