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For example - comments. I mean, REALLY ignore. How can I do this?

The problem is that lots of people submit spammy comments, like:

Hi cool article, visit example.com

Then I get emails from the webmaster of example.com telling me to remove the comment because Google penalized his site because of "unnatural links"

I have captcha, also the system is set up to ignore comments with 3 or more links, but spam still goes through :(

Can I make Google ignore comments completely, and not use them to rank sites and stuff?

Patrick Mevzek
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Annie
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  • Address the real problem. If people are filling up your site with worthless comments, then you need better moderation of which comments you publish on your site. – Quentin May 08 '13 at 12:46

3 Answers3

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There is an easy way to do this: Put the comment display in an iframe and block the path to that iframe using robots.txt. They way search engines you not be allowed to see it.

Another way is to load the comments dynamically via AJAX. Without special markup, crawlers cannot view the content loaded asynchronously. They may some day but for now they do not. This has the advantage of speeding things up too.

PS: I do suggest you clean up or moderate the comments. There are many strategies which depend on what experience you want your users to have. The number one goal should be for you to make the site a good experience for legitimate visitors and having no spam is a good step in that direction.

Itai
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You would need to hide contents of these comments by using questionable tactics, the punishment of hiding these comments would be outweigh the dilution of your page by useless comments. We refer to this as cloaking and search engines do not take too kindly to most cloaking. Search engines want to see what your audience sees and everything should be a factor.

If you consider your comments to be a problem then you need to delete those comments, not only are they slowing down your SQL they will be hurting your SEO though page dilution and outbounds if you allow it.

Captcha

Captcha can be cracked using online decoders that cost as little as $0.01, so today its less effective than it was when it first came out.

You want a mix of things to stop the spam, but the rubbish comments you have now you should clean these up.

I recommend you take a look at these posts:

Community
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Simon Hayter
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You should make sure that the comment links are equipped with the rel='nofollow' attribute. That way Google doesn't use them as ranking signals.

You may also want to consider using some smart anti-spam system like Akismet that isn't vulnerable to manual or algorithmic decoding of captchas.

Of course, you should clean up the existing spam comments as suggested by the previous answers.

Simon Hayter
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Arttu Raittila
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