May 23, 2012

The Effects of Google’s New Commenting System on Spam and Facebook

Google will be launching a new third-party commenting system that will incorporate with Google Plus, the search engine’s web services and web search. The commenting system and other new Google products were discussed at the sidelines of a Google event called G-Saudi Arabia.

The third-party commenting platform will likely affect organic rankings by reducing comment spam, search engine optimization (SEO), and attract Facebook users to Google Plus. The new system will be Google’s tool in limiting comment spam that is manipulating their ranking algorithms and artificially inflating a website’s rankings.

Websites using other commenting systems have troubled Google because the search engine cannot accurately determine whether the content is legitimate or manipulative. It partly resolved this issue by downgrading the comments and focusing more on other content and created the No-follow attribute recommended for un-trusted content, paid links, and crawl prioritization.

The new commenting system will give a new source of content from Google profiles confirmed as legitimate, and authors of comments will receive scores based on their activity in Google and its web products and have the value of their comments assessed. For spammers to manipulate the search engine’s algorithms, they have to increase their activities on YouTube, Gchat, Gmail, and other Google products so that their author profiles will earn a credible trust rating before Google can appraise the value of their comments.

Once a commenter is confirmed as a legitimate person, an opportunity comes for Google to allow links within comments to benefit the sites that they are linked to. Google can still flag and devalue links posted by a commenter over a short brief period, which can still discourage spammers who have gained some author credibility. The search engine will incorporate links related to the topic, have good click-through rates, and posted by an author who rarely comments into its search ranking algorithms.

Integrating the new commenting platform into other Google products will enable comments posted on third-party websites to appear in Google search results and Google Plus. Google’s commenting system is expected to challenge the dominance of the third-party commenting platforms of Facebook, Disqus, and Livefyre. It is particularly targeting Facebook because the search engine hopes that its platform will convert new Google Plus users.