What constitutes spam?

Yes. People leave comments just for the back-link ot their site. it’s a very common and very popular SEO method that’s bene used for a long time now.

Basically, if a comment comes from someone that you don’t know, and it looks like it doesn’t have anything to do with the post, then there’s a 99.9999% chance that it’s SPAM. Even when it does look like it’s a good comment it can still be SPAM. It can be tricky to tell the difference.

The bigest problem is that there’s a lot of automated programs out there that can register, log in to your site, post comments and do more, and they are used to SEO “professionals” all around the world to boos ttheir own back-link count.

For myself, I treat anything that has a link in it as suspicious unless I know the person that posted that comment for real. If it looks like SPAM, it’s SPAM. Anything that is like the ones that you are getting (incoherent, don’t read properly, links back to a common site) should be deleted and have that users account deleted/baned.

Just as a note, this isn’t just a WordPress issue, This happens on almost every platform out there.

Thank you so much, this is very helpful. If someone leaves a nice comment and it seems relevant and coherent but also has a back-link to their own site isn’t that a good thing for my search ranking? (As long as their site is not something objectionable?)

I do want comments and interaction to rank higher right?

having other peoples links on your site makes no difference at all to your own SEO or page rank. You can be penalised for linking to “bad” neighbourhoods, but the definition of this is very broad, so can be hard to police.

A good general rule-of-thumb is that if it the link goes to a page that’s relevant to your own content, or it’s something that you feel is useful for your visitors, then it’s not a bad thing to leave it there. After all, link sare what makes the web go around.

The comments and interaction can definately help. If the big G sees more people visting your site and sees that there’s more content changes on the pages (eg: more comments) when it does it’s indexing, it will help to give you a boost. It just needs that little bit of policing to get right.

Thanks, that makes sense. I installed Akismet today. I understand this is a pretty good plugin for spam. I don’t know how it determines which ones are spam and which are not. Have you had experience with this plugin?

Akismet is an excellent plugin for starters. It will block an overwhelming majority of spam with very few false positives.

zep – We use it here in the forums ??