Comments on: Plagiarized Blog Comments as Negative SEO

By: John at Website Building biz

John at Website Building biz — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:28:36 +0000

It seems to have fixed the issue, but I can’t be sure if it was intended as an attack. Some of the passages came from a college essay site’s samples and it was on an education-finance blog that gets a lot of confused requests from people with poor language skills. I describe a lot of scholarships, grants and financial aid opportunities but some people who don’t read English well seem to think the comment section is an application form! So, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if someone had paid into an essay writing service that was nothing more than a collection of famous lines, and they thought I was going to send ’em a check for it.

Remember, malice is often indistinguishable from stupidity!

By: trade show sensei

trade show sensei — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:50:56 +0000

hi John,
I read this post a while ago, and then read a different blog recently that reminded me of your post.
The conclusion of that blog post made sense. Generally, google ignores duplicate content unless it thinks it is spam, and then it punishes it. I wonder if this mix of multiple copied sentences looked like one of those blasted scraper programs that steals bits from all over and then stitches them together. That is, it looked like scraper spam to google.
Anyway, do you still think this comment is what tanked you, and that it was because of the comment (that is, google did punish you for the content of your page rather than just ignoring it).
And finally, do you think this was done on purpose?
~ Steve, the trade show sensei

By: Update – Removing One Comment Results in 20 Page SERP Boost

Update – Removing One Comment Results in 20 Page SERP Boost — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:43:55 +0000

[…] the investigation, I noticed an odd comment that had been copied from other […]

By: ZXT

ZXT — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:43:41 +0000

Wow that was some kind of new plagiarism. Good thing you found out. I didn’t think a comment could do that to your blog (fall off the ranking) as if you are the copy cat.

By: John at Website Building biz

John at Website Building biz — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 21:46:55 +0000

Well, Mixx & Digg as well as some others have gone to nofollow, so I think its just getting tougher in general for bloggers to hold on to PR. I also had a site up at PR5 but these days anything past 3 seems like a stretch. Anyway, its that search traffic that really matters, so I try to not worry about the actual PR number so much.

But yeah, if you have certain URLs that just suddenly vanish, I would recommend investigating any fishy comments – even if they don’t include a link!

By: Alex Sysoef

Alex Sysoef — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:24:17 +0000

This is interesting concept. I have lost visual PR on my site and all the pages as result and went from PR5 to 4 and current 3. I still rank well for getting traffic but overall PR just not returning to its old state.

Been trying to figure out why – now have another idea to check