Will 19,000 Spam Comments affect Smart Pricing

[guru5571]

I have a blog that I lost interest in and stopped posting to about 6 months ago. The site has contiued to get about 100 uniques a day. I also had Adsense running on it. Today, to my horror, I found over 19,000 spam comments on my blog. Obviously, these were designed to give links to lots of sites that I wouldn't want to be associated with. I had to go into the database to delete all the comments since the bulk edit on wordpress wasn't up to job. I've since disabled comments. My question is: Would these linkspam comments engage smart pricing across all my sites and drive down the payout for my entire account. My eCPM has decreased slightly over the past months and I'm wondering whether this was the cause. Since this happened to me, I can only imagine how many others are unaware of the same thing happening to them.

[Lexur]

My eCPM has decreased slightly over the past months...

When you are smatpriced your eCPM falls like a rock in most cases, maybe to 1/3 or 1/4.

[edited by: Lexur at 5:38 am (utc) on Sep. 8, 2006]

[guru5571]

I would say mine is down about 1/5 since February.

[jomaxx]

I doubt very much whether the AdSense team particularly care who you link to. There could be consequences on Google's search engine side.

[UserFriendly]

AdSense TOS forbids use on sites that promote certain content. If the spam links to hundreds of pornography websites, they may care.

guru, can you add a human-challenge feature to your comment system so that automated systems fail to work? Also, you could code it to send you any comments posted that feature hyperlinks (even in text form), which you could then approve or delete.

[Car_Guy]

I thought smart pricing a site could make it go either way, up or down.

I'd delete the blog, change my sitemap, and have the site indexed again.

[jomaxx]

Smart pricing goes one way only - down. Otherwise advertisers would end up being charged more than maximum bid.

It's true that linking to porn/gambling/etc. links are prohibited, but TOS considerations are unlikely to affect smart pricing anyway. As for the TOS itself, I doubt Google would do anything more serious than sending an email since the links are clearly due to malicious spam. But the links are gone now, so this seems like a moot point.

[Zygoot]

Remove these comments as soon as possible and implement a CAPTCHA to prevent spam bots from submitting this crap to your blog.

It's hard to say how they affect your earnings. It could be that you're earning less because all these spam comments may attract less relevant ads (if you aren't using the google ad section start/end tags).

[guru5571]

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I think CAPTCHA is a good idea, but with this particular blog, I just turned off comments entirely since I don't plan on checking in on it for a while. I keep a good eye on most of my other sites so I've never seen such heavy spamming on one of my sites before. I'm guessing the reason is it had been inactive for a while and spammers probably noticed that they're links weren't being deleted. So as for me, the problem is now solved.

Whether it did affect my Adsense or not, I'm really not sure. As far as the wider implications. Imagine all the blogs that people have lost interest in that allow comments. Some may still retain their rankings as authority sites, etc. Unless they lose it from all the spam links.