How Low Quality Or Spam Reader Comments Can Affect Ranking

It's important to moderate your comments to avoid self-promotional comments that can destroy your traffic.

Even just low quality comments or off-topic comments can pull down your ranking.

Once in a while I see comments in hubs that are used purely to post spam with self-promotional links to other sites.

Hubbers who leave the option open for anyone to post a comment without being moderated may be victimized by this practice.

I decided to disable comments for anyone who is not a registered Hubber. The following is only my opinion, but I wanted to share it with you.

Comments are part of your web page and can affect your Hub's ranking.

If someone places a link in your comments to a site that is known by Google to be low quality, it may negatively affect your hub's ranking.

Review your comments carefully and pay special attention to the backlinks. I noticed that I started to get some really short comments from people who are not Hubbers. Something silly like “Nice Hubs” with a link to a site selling something totally unrelated.

The default setting of the comments capsule allows anyone to comment and use a link to their website. If they were a registered Hubber then the link would go to their profile, which is fine. But unregistered readers can enter any URL they want. And they do this to get backlinks at your expense. The problem is that unregistered users can post self-promotional comments in your hubs and link to their site.

Comments in hubs are not the place for advertising. We Hubbers are working hard enough to try and get a good PageRank and we can't afford to have someone else upset the balance.

Although outgoing links may not directly affect Google PageRank, more than two links to the same domain are against HP's rules. Links to well-known Web resources are exempt from this limitation.

HP uses the nofollow attribute on external links in comments. So I have to assume they don't count those against you. But those links still may be going to spam sites and promoting the person who posted a comment at your expense.

Beware The Spammers

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You need to check for backlinks in comments. Even when I disabled the comments from non-Hubbbers, I still got Spam in my comments. Spammers would sign up for a HubPages account and get their Spam into comments anyway.

Whenever I see a comment mentioning another product I follow the link to the profile and it usually turns out to be a Hubber who just signed up within a day or two and has no hubs. So I made my own policy that I will not allow comments that make unrelated recommendations or that have a link to an outside website.

In addition to that, HP clearly states in every comment capsule that "Comments are not for promoting your Hubs or other sites." So when I moderate my comments I deny any comments that do not follow this rule.

You may call this censoring. And I am against that. I am one who believes in free speech. But when it comes to advertising, especially if done in a sneaky way, I consider that stealing resources. So this falls into a completely different category than free speech. Wouldn't you agree?

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You can go to each Hub and check for new comments. But if you have your email settings set to notify you when you get a comment, this will be easy to monitor.

Go to your account page and click "Profile" then "Email Settings." Here you can review a number of options that you may wish to change from the default settings.

If you don't wish to receive email notification, you can verify if any comments are waiting for you to moderate by clicking to your home page. You do that by clicking the HubPages logo when you are logged in.

On your home page you will see a number next to the word "Comments" which is to the right of your avatar. When you click on “Comments” you will see a list of all the unmoderated comments.

Normally you will just have two choices as shown in Figure 1. You either Approve the comment or Deny it.

I noticed a few times already that HubPages does their own spam checking as I have received some comments that were automatically marked as spam by Hubpages. In that case you will see a button that says “Not Spam” (as shown in Figure 2 below) that you can click if you consider them wrong. But HubPages was right each time.

Another button is the “Delete Forever.” I click that after I click the “Deny” button or when it’s Spam. No need to keep it, I’m not going to change my mind. Are you?

If you see a little arrow-icon next to the name like that in Figure 2 above, then you need to check it out. HP already anticipated that this is spam. That icon means that the comment was made by a non-hubber and they used a link to another website.

I usually click on these to see where they go. But be careful. It could be a malicious site that plants a virus on your computer. Make sure you have your anti-virus protection up to date before checking out any links.

I use Mozilla Firefox for my web browser, which blocks known malicious websites that plant a virus on your computer. I found a site like this already once from a posted comment. But Firefox blocked it with a warning. If your browser has this protection or if you have anti-virus and anti-spyware protection then you should be okay.

If HubPages didn't already mark a comment as spam and you want to deny it, click the “Deny” button (shown in Figure 1 above). Then the options change as in Figure 3 as shown here. You can change it back to “Approve” or you can report it to HP as Spam by clicking the Spam button.

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You can simplify the task of moderating comments to some degree. When in edit mode, the comments capsule has options you can select to control who can post comments. See Figure 4 below.

The extreme method is to put a check mark on the item that says “Only signed-in users may post comments” as shown below.

If you prefer to review new comments and approve them you can put a check mark in "Comments must be approved before they appear." But I suggest you do this only if you can keep up with moderating them in a timely manner.

You can go back and edit published Hubs if you need to change the comment settings. But make sure you don’t delete the comment capsule. Doing so will lose all your present comments. Just changing the settings and saving the modified capsule will not lose existing comments.

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If you prefer to use the same settings for all your Hubs, you can specify that in the global settings in your account. Click to your account Hubs list , then click on "Comments" in the link list on the left. Then click "show settings" and you will see a page similar to the example in Figure 5 below.

Here you can decide if you want each option to be globally set (on or off) in all your Hubs, or if you want the individual Hubs to have their own configuration.

You might have special cases peculiar to the subject of a specific Hub that warrants using a different setting. But basically, as you can see in the example below, I've decided to have just one item always set globally... "Comments must be approved before they appear." The others I leave to set in each Hub. But whatever works best for you is fine.

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The Good

What if your reader simply wants to add value by linking to a resource in their comment?

I read in one of Google's Blogs that they increase your ranking a little if you have links to highly ranked pages on other sites. The reason for this is that you are adding value by giving your reader other resources that Google has determined to be of value.

But the Google blog went on to say that if you link to low quality pages then your ranking will be lowered somewhat.

So it’s important to check the site they are linking to. If it truly adds value and is not meant to be self-promotional, then you might want to leave it and approve the comment. But check first. Don’t take it for granted.

The Bad

There is another important thing to consider. And that’s the total number of outgoing links in your Hub.

According to HubPages’ rules, you can’t make a Hub overly promotional. They explain in the help section that including more than two links to any one domain can cause your Hub to be flagged as overly promotional.

But they also say "Links to well-known Web resources are exempt from this limitation." That coincides with the way Google treats external links. If you add value to pointing to a useful resource, then there is no problem with that.

So we have to be careful with links in comments. Approve comments or delete them using your own discretion. But check it out so you can make the right decision.

You don't need to feel guilty about it because HubPages has the statement right there in the comment capsule for your reader to see that says, "Comments are not for promoting Hubs or other sites."

If you find comments that link to their own Hubs, you have the right to deny it. They are stealing your resources. You might want to check out their status. If their Hub has a low score, then linking to low-quality content can pull down your own ranking, according to Google’s Blog. They say that ranking is affected by the rank of sites you link to.

There are many high quality writers on HubPages and their scores might be bad for the same reasons I talk about here, reasons that are not related to their own writing, but related to comments in their hubs.

Google does not like spam. If it's in the comments section, it's the same as being in your hub. Google considers it as spam and traffic to your hub will be affected by those comments. I have discovered an improvement in my Hub Scores when I removed comments that were spammy.

The Sneaky

I discovered a few comments from people who were not Hubbers had taken advantage of the backlink feature that HubPages allows for non-Hubbers leaving comments.

When they leave a comment they can enter a URL to make their name a hyperlink. If you click their name you’ll see it is a link to their website.

In some cases I saw that their website was a useless sales pitch site. Whenever I deleted those comments and I usually noticed after a week or so that the Hub Score would go higher.

The Conclusion

It was also confirmed by another Hubber who commented below about her positive results with getting more search engine traffic after removing comments with spam and links.

So it's confirmed that it pays to moderate the comments people leave in your Hubs. Consider it an important part of the business of writing.

Copyright © 2010 Glenn Stok

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