Do you police the comment spam on your blog? You should!

• I have a pretty popular blog that routinely has its blog posts ranked pretty quickly. I have noticed that some past blog posts that were ranking well have suddenly dropped like a rock in the Google rankings. After reviewing them they all seemed to share similar spammy comment links. My blog is dofollow. Could this be the reason the posts have dropped?

Answer: You are right to be concerned. Google does penalize the PageRank of blogs that have comment spam. Unfortuately, your do follow blog with its high PageRank posts is a huge target for this type of spam.

There are great tools, like Akismet, that are available to catch those spam comments at the page level. Of course you can also add a verification tag or CAPTCHA to your comments to help trip up those spam bots. I'm sorry to say that the only guaranteed fix for this is to regularly inspect your blog comments.

Readers love comments on blogs since it furthers the conversation. Dofollow comments are even better because it allows you, as the site owner, to reward those users who contribute to the discussion you start on your blog.

Inversely, having a dofollow blog does open you up to manipulation by spammers who seek out and specifically target posts on those blogs that have accumulated PageRank. These comments can run the gamut from things such as hairy naked legs to nude female wrestling and everything in between.

Our advice: monitor your comments closely and police your blog as you would your own content.

When you find comment spam on your site remove it immediately. In most cases, once an affected page is cleaned up it will bounce back to its original rankings during the next recache by Google.

- Casey Markee, Writer & Lead SEO Consultant, Planet Ocean...