In a word, Yes. If you currently run any blogs and have comments on, you’ll know that 95%+ of your comments are comment spam. So yes, it’s still a thing. But the better question is, in 2018, does comment spam work?
History of Comment Spam
I’ve had blogs off and on since 2005. And for the last 13 years, whenever I don’t have the comment spam blocker installed or updated, I get to see hundreds, if not thousands, of comments every time I check. Many of them have to do with where to get the latest Viagra knockoff, how to get dopamine, or what I can do with my breast milk.
Here’s what comment spam typically looks like. Some sort of anchor text, with a comment that makes zero sense whatsoever.
Comment spam has been around since 2003, so 15 years now! The reason comment spam has worked is that google values links, and theoretically if you get enough links to your site for a particular keyword, you’ll rank higher in the free search results. It’s spam (because there’s no value at all to any real user), it’s risky (because it violates search engine guidelines), but it worked – certainly from 2003 to 2012, when Google started sending out all of those link warnings.
Does Comment Spam Still Work?
Is it possible that in 2018 comment spam still works? Surely Google is sophisticated enough to ignore all comments, and most of them are no-followed anyway. So, it’s probably a complete waste and solely a contribution to web trash, right?
Well, not exactly.
I went through an unfortunate and oftentimes unscrupulous deep dive into the world of comment spam links. But fortunately, I did find some examples that were relatively clean. Like check out this blog post from August 21, 2016 – http://www.dansshopclass.com/hello-world/.
It looks like Dan started up a blog and forgot about it, which happens quite a bit. And “Hello World” is a standard intro blog post that comes with most WordPress themes. That particular intro blog post happened to be so engaging that it now has 4,952 comments.
If you clicked on the link, you would see that zero of the 4,952 comments had any value at all – they were all comment spam.
I picked out some, that you can see below, along with some keyword traffic stats from SEMrush, and how many backlinks in total the site has (again, according to Rush).
1. IowaLandGuy.com leaves a comment with the anchor text “Iowa Farmland”. He’s a big fan of the article! And it looks like his strategy is working, having gone from 6 top 100 rankings on google in August to almost 300 today.
2. GingerBlaast.com enjoyed the helpful info, and with 152K backlinks, GB probably enjoyed the info on a lot of other blog posts as well! The site has gained rankings, from 23 top 100 rankings in September to 125 today.
3. Here’s another one who’s impressed, FurnitureExpertsMovers.com, with the anchor text “moving help”. They have almost 400K backlinks to the site. It looks like the site has been around a very short time, and rankings are improving.
4. Now here’s one I found that actually dropped rankings, from 15,153 top 100 rankings in October to 12,600 top 100’s today. And they have over 100K backlinks as well.
So that has to hurt right? Well, it looks like whoever runs hpprinterdriver.net also runs…
5. HPDrivers.net, which is doing just fine thanks, gradually improving rankings, and is commenting on the same blog post, with the same anchor text.
So my guess is they have several of these sites, and if any of them get dinged by Google for being spammy spammers, it’s no big deal because there are many others.
But that got me to thinking, if sites are getting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of comment spam links, it’s got to be pretty expensive right?
Nope.
How Much Does Comment Spam Cost?
I went to https://www.blackhatlinks.com/ and found that you can buy 20,000 comment spam links for $36. That’s 5 links for a penny!
So you can see what’s going on here. Put up a site, blast a bunch of links at it for cheap, and if it doesn’t work out, try try again. These are just a handful of example above, but it sure seems like content spam still works, at least to some degree.
For established ecommerce sites, that’s certainly NOT the way to go because Google will destroy your rankings eventually. But if you’ve got a spammy short-term approach to things, well, there’s definitely a market for you.