Spam Posts on Your Blog/Forum Can Result in a Manual Penalty

Sites that have a lot of User Generated Content (UCG) are labor intensive and can quickly turn into a full-time job. That being said, the payoff is that Google loves this type of content as long as it's quality and not spammy. Seems like a no brainer right?

Well, this topic is back in the spotlight after Mozilla reported that they had received a Webmaster Tool's notice about user-generated spam that they were quick to share on the forums:

"Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site."

Google then responded with:

"In this particular case, it was the url http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ that we took action on, and that was because it was so defaced with spam comments. I checked the URL this morning and it was over 12 megabytes (!) of spam from 21,169 different comments. When a page like that lands in our search results, it's the sort of thing that users complain to us about, so we are willing to take action."

You can see the entire conversation within Google's help forums here.

So Mozilla's Webmaster publicly cries out because they received a penalty on a page that has over 12 megabytes of spammy comments on it?! Makes a person wonder how up on things that Webmaster really is (ouch). Spammy comments not only ruin a good blog or forum, they also ruin search results. No one wants to see that kind of clutter when surfing the Web. So, if you are moderating any site that allows user generated content then you need to do your part to keep it spam free.

What constitutes a spammy comment? In our opinion, it's any comment that does not add any value to the conversation. You want readers to learn from posts and not be weighted down shifting through useless comments and posts. Also beware of a comment/post that includes any of the following:

• Is unrelated to topic discussed.
• Has an outbound link.
• Mentions a business or location, or product specifically.<...