If you have a blog, at least a popular enough blog, then you have probably seen lots of spam comments awaiting your approval, in your dashboard. So, firstly what is Spam? Spam is a blog post or a comment which adds no value to the host’s blog, forum, wiki etc, and is only for the sake of getting backlinks. Spamming has gained popularity as it temporarily increases the search engine rankings of a certain web site by gaining huge amount of links in a short period of time.

Now, you must have seen spam comments hitting your blog every day. This number, increases with the increase in popularity and traffic of your blog. I have even seen days when my blog got hit by more than a 1000 spam comments. I seriously felt pathetic clearing out those spam comments. But after researching a lot, I have found ways to combat this spam with precision and I have discussed these simple methods in my previous article.

In this article, I would like to discuss the reasons, why you should not approve a single spam comment in your blog. How these spam comments, can harm your blog invisibly, without even letting you know.

1) Google Hates Spam

The first and the foremost thing about spam, is the Google penalty. I hope you know that Google hates spam and it will hate you too, if you are someway related to spam. Now, you can tell me, that you yourself are not spamming any blog, then why should you suffer?

The reason is simple. If you start approving spam comments in your blog, then you will be giving out outbound links to many spammy sites. Now, giving out backlinks to relevant sites is not considered wrong by Google. But linking to spammy sites, is seriously something very wrong according to Google.

Suppose, you approve 20-25 spam comments daily (the actual figures are way high), then within a month you will be giving backlinks to more than 700 spammy sites. And within a year, it will be around 10,000 spammy links. Google will not penalize you just on the first day you approve a spam comment. It will slowly track your activities and will penalize you badly for hosting too much spam and your overall site rankings will go down.

Google will consider your site to be a spam hub, from where thousands of spammy sites are getting backlinks. They have enough reasons to ban your site from search results for hosting too much spam. I hope you will not want this to happen.

2) Poor User Experience

Spam not only can get your site permanently banned from Google, but also can lead to very poor user experience. Every visitor likes to see many good and relevant of comments for all blog posts. These comments add more value to a post and the readers can join a discussion with many other readers through these comments. But no one likes to see a single spam comment as they add no value to your posts. They are just non-sense stuffs written just for the sake of gaining backlinks.

Even if a visitor would think of writing a comment on your blog, but will change hiss/her mind after seeing hundreds of spam comments everywhere, and will immediately think of leaving your site. So only approve those comments which can add value to your site. The spammers are becoming intelligent day by day. Now spammers are employing human based spamming attacks, where cheap human labours are used for writing spam comments. It will make you think that these comments are authentic, but don’t get deceived.

You should rely on Akismet by all means. I have discussed everything about Akismet in my previous article about dealing spam. If Akismet is telling you that the comment is spam, then try to believe that. But Akismet sometimes makes some minor mistakes. A few times, I saw some of my authentic and genuine comments (written by my well-konown friends in my blog) went to the spam folder. But you should read each and every spam comment, and should decide wisely whether to un-spam it or not.

3) Spam Can Overflow Your Database

This is a quite overlooked factor, as most of the bloggers are using high-end servers with unlimited databases. But technically speaking, nothing is unlimited in reality. Everything has got its own limits.

Suppose, if your blog is getting 20-25 spam comments daily. And you are taking no measures to stop them, then within a year you can have around 10,000 spam comments, as per the previous calculations. So, 10,000 extra, non-sense, useless stuffs will do nothing but penalize your site from Google, will make your loyal readers immediately leave your site and at last will flood your databases with useless junk.

But is it desirable? Do you want to flood your databases with useless junk that does no good to you. Even if you have unlimited databases but still is it really needed to stuff them with thousands of spammy comments. You can keep them free for storing other important and valuable data for your blog.

So, these are the three main reason of not approving spam on your blog. Judge and decide wisely. Sometimes spam comments can be written in such a way to tempt you to approve them. But try to rely on Akismet, as it generally doesn’t make any mistakes. But still, as I said before judge and decide wisely. Use your common senses as they are the best means to combat spam.