User Generated Content can ruin your SEO
Web 2.0 is all about user generated content and while its great to finally be able to let your customers interact with your site it’s also important not to let things go too far.
One day people can be happily uploading valuable blog content to your travel site and the next you have been banned from Google for hosting millions of parasite pages advertising pharmaceutical products.
So many huge sites these days are full of spam that it can sometimes seem like a losing battle, even archive.org has been taken over by spammers uploading dubious text content just to get a link from the homepage.
Three years ago the Guardian got overrun with spam and they still haven’t got round to deleting it. Pretty much every other mainstream publication has the same problem.
You would be forgiven for thinking that if these mainstream sites can still rank highly while full of spam Google is clever enough to figure it out. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. If your 10 page site gets spammed then be prepared for a hasty drop in rankings with no questions asked, sure Google might tell you whats happened but the best case scenario is a month of little to no web traffic while the issue is fixed.
When you start to think about adding user generated content the first thing you need to do is talk to your SEO team. Ask them how you can safeguard your site and make sure you don’t suffer any penalties.
The safest thing is to pre-moderate all your users comments and validate accounts before you let people post but you should also be prepared to audit your databases every few weeks to delete spam thats slipped through the net.
If you leave loopholes then the spammers will find a way through.
Amazing that the Guardian has left the spam in!
Comment by Neil Matthews — October 19, 2007 @ 11:40 am
My website’s forum has been flooded with people trying to get links to irrelavant sites. Interesting blog. Thanks
Comment by -Tom from create a website — December 26, 2007 @ 5:16 pm
Patrick really hits the nail on the head in mentioning “pre-moderate all your users comments”.
As it is often said, common sense is terribly uncommon.
Comment by Christopher — February 25, 2008 @ 9:13 pm
Spam is a never-ending battle, I don’t care how good of a set of eyes you have or what latest plug-ins you use: if your site is popular, spammers will see a spam-magnet and be drawn to your site like a bee to honey. Never ending diligence!
Comment by Matt Keegan — March 11, 2008 @ 12:11 am
Spammers are a pain and can damage your website’s reputation. However, in Wordpress you can protect your website from Spammers by reviewing the comments.
Some blogs have “nofollow” on hyperlinks, from a link building point of view it is not a good thing. However, if your a website or blog owner you are protecting your own interests.
Comment by Lincolnshire Web Design — April 2, 2008 @ 2:46 pm
Absolutlety right Patrick, spam is the biggest headache to all of us, Off late our encylopedia’s PHPBB forum has been flooded with all p**n and viagra/virus links, and we are seriously thinking on disabling it in future
Comment by Shekhar — May 7, 2008 @ 4:50 pm
Exactly true Patrick, Using any search engine ranking technique which causes a degradation in the quality of the results produced by the search engines, including sending of large numbers of e-mail, and e-mail ads in particular, to numerous e-mail users; or blanket postings to the same newsgroup.
Comment by Aamir SEO India — May 16, 2008 @ 7:06 am