Spamco or comment spam: everything you need to know

What is Spamco?

Before delving into the details, it is essential to understand what spamco is. The term refers to spam in comments a blog or a website.

Spammers generally publish useless and irrelevant comments to promote their own site or product, gain visibility or damage a competitor's reputation.

These comments are often filled with irrelevant links, adverts and other unwanted content.

Why do spammers do this?

The simple answer to this question is that spammers seek to take advantage of every possible opportunity to attract attention to their site or product.

They think that if their comments are visible to a large audience, this may lead to more clicks on their link, increasing their popularity and even generating additional sales. What's more, some people use this technique as part of Black Hat SEO.

Spamco and Black Hat SEO

To better understand the impact of comment spam on SEO, it is essential to know what Black Hat SEO.

This is an unethical approach to improving a website's ranking in search engines, such as Google using prohibited techniques. These practices are often considered to be misleading or manipulative and can result in heavy penalties from search engines, particularly Google.

Spamco as a Black Hat SEO technique

Comment spam can be considered a Black Hat SEO technique when it aims to deceive search engines about the quality or relevance of a page.

The idea is simple: a spammer posts comments containing links to his own site on various blogs or websites. These inbound links (also known as backlinks) used to be able to contribute to PageRank, and therefore potentially improve a site's ranking in search results.

Towards the end of comment spam thanks to Google updates?

• • Penguin : This update was rolled out to counter Black Hat SEO techniques and penalise sites that tried to artificially obtain higher rankings by manipulating the number of links pointing to their pages. As a result, many sites abusing comment spam have seen their position in the search results fall.
    
    
  • nofollow : Another measure taken by Google to combat comment spam was the introduction of the rel="nofollow" attribute, which allows search engines to be told not to take a link into account when calculating PageRank. This feature is designed to deter spammers by making their efforts less effective.

However, while these actions have considerably reduced the number of spam comments, they have not completely eliminated this scourge.

Consequences of Spamco on your blog and how to protect yourself against it

Comment spam can have several negative impacts on your blog:

1. It can be detrimental to the overall quality of your content as readers can lose confidence when they see irrelevant comments or harmful advertising.
2. Search engines could penalise your site if they detect too much spam, even if you are not the cause. This seriously damages your ranking and therefore your visibility.

How can I protect myself from comment spam?

Here are a few tips to prevent your blog from falling victim to comment spam:

• Comment moderation : Make sure you check every comment submitted to your blog and only approve those that are relevant to your content. This gives you total control over the comments published and prevents spam from being displayed automatically.
• Using a CAPTCHA : The addition of a CAPTCHA function (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) can help prevent automated spam as it forces users to prove they are human by solving a simple task before they can submit a comment.
• Block suspicious IPs : If you notice several spam attempts from a specific IP address, you can block this address to prevent future abuse.

In a nutshell, spamco is an unethical technique that consists of publishing undesirable comments on blogs and websites in order to profit from them, particularly as part of Black Hat SEO.

However, being aware of its consequences and acting accordingly helps to minimise its negative effects on your website and enables you to maintain a quality experience for your readers.