When you’re trying to optimize a website, much of your focus is on the content you create. That is, you spend you’re time thinking about how to rank well for specific keywords or making sure your site doesn’t have any duplicate content. This is all fine and well but it leaves a huge gap in your strategy. You see, this doesn’t take user-generated spam into account. And this can have a drastically negative impact on your SEO efforts.
So, what is user-generated spam, exactly? According to the head of the webspam team over at Google, Matt Cutts, user-generated spam can come in a number of different forms. For instance, a popular form is spammy posts on forums or even spammy profiles on forums. Comments on blogs are another example. They’re stuffed with keywords and links and generally low quality content. While these aren’t the website owner’s fault, having too many spammy posts can bring your SEO down and actually negatively affect your site’s ranking.
Typically, Google will deal with this by only making it so the specific areas of the site that have the user-generated spam are punished. So, your entire site won’t plummet in the search results unless the whole site is infested with spam.
Once you’ve identified this problem, it’s time to fix it. So, this means going in and deleting all of the spammy profiles, posts, and comments. Basically, it means cleaning house on your site. Then, in order to ensure your SEO efforts aren’t for naught in the future, you need to implement measures to prevent user-generated spam from coming back. This means putting in comment filters on your blog or forum to block the popular spammy terms. It also means using a CAPTCHA on your blog that’s complicated enough to prevent bots from posting spam comments automatically. This is really important for preventing new spammy comments from appearing and further damaging your search engine rank.
Additionally, you can promote a moderator to your forum to ensure any spam comments or posts that do get through are taken care of immediately.
Basically, when it comes to controlling user-generated spam and maintaining your site’s reputation, you need to do some legwork. Yes, it’s annoying but by putting the right preventative measures in place, you help to ensure all the work you pour into your SEO efforts holds up.
Affordable SEO Company (https://www.affordableseofl.com/) offers negative SEO and user generted spam remediation service.
Follow us on
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AffordableSEOTampa
Twitter: https://twitter.com/affordableseofl
Google+: https://plus.google.com/101488717415424186368
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/affordable-seo-tampa