So... Who wants the Google Scoop of the year?

[morestar]

I should have asked him for more info.

Go ahead and ask him...let's see what he/she says.

[RyanJones]

so I must have missed the part about the comments never appearing anywhere on the web. Are you sure Google was referring to the comments that were never visible? Are you sure they were never visible? Were there other comments on the page? Were they visible for a while then deleted?

I'm just trying to see if there's any other way Google could have found the links..

[morestar]

Were they visible for a while then deleted?

I'm just trying to see if there's any other way Google could have found the links..

That might be a good question, but I'll wager William checked cached versions and so forth, even though the cached version could have changed but the admin said he deleted a slew and...

I dug a little deeper and contacted the blog admin. He told me that he had gotten a whole slew of spam and had marked every comment as spam.

I guess we'd have to go on the integrity of the words of the admin...and if the dates align.

[BrandonHeate]

So now links are suspicious because they are too perfectly contextual? That seems to me to defeat the whole purpose of contextual linking in the first place

[chauhan]

I have also the same story but in my case its Forum profile link. I got "unnatural link" message in GWT after replying to them they have given one of my forum profile link which is around one year old forum profile link in which I have done only 5 posts. I think it happen because I am not active member of that forum since one year.

[chrisJumbo]

So now links are suspicious because they are too perfectly contextual? That seems to me to defeat the whole purpose of contextual linking in the first place

I've seen comments elsewhere about Google looking at pages that are "too" SEO'd. In the natural world, you have a mix of links and I would wager a guess that most would not be contextual/keyword links. Anyway, I will try to get more details from the guy.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Well, apparently Google is denying the Akismet theory:

There are some rumors going across the SEO channels that Google is using data from comment spam filter Akismet. Those rumors are untrue.

A Google spokesperson told us “we don’t use Akismet to flag spam.”

Google: No, We Don’t Use Akismet To Catch Link Spam

[williamc]

Well, apparently Google is denying the Akismet theory:

Google: No, We Don’t Use Akismet To Catch Link Spam

While I generally respect Barrys articles, he made some errors in this one when he stated:

The SEOs were using the classic correlation is equal to causation. Where a couple webmasters received one of those unnatural link notification warnings from Google and also noticed an increase in marking comments as spam.

which is inaccurate, or he simply did not read the entire first post. The example given was an exact URL, of which a link never once appeared on due to not being accepted by the admin, and upon which the admin marked as spam with a large number of other comments.

Morestar: you are correct in that I checked googles cache for the page, as well as every saved copy at the wayback machine page. In none of these did that comment appear.

[seoimage]

Perhaps its toolbar data pulls to access the admin area. Google is known for getting into places its not suppose to be in. The simple fact that they're even pulling data like this tells you that "nofollow" is actually valuable, if they're actually after comment spam. Unfortunately, the issue with Google is the concept is too simple and like many other linking algo factors it allows "negative seo" to be a factor which now seems indisputable based on this. Just put your competitors in a comment and mark it as spam - "come now, come now, we don't have to be so dumb now".

The main issue now with Google is that they seem to be a negative algo. By this I mean they spend more time penalizing then coming up with better ways of relevance (strike through relevance and make that popularity). Are their days of ingenuity coming to an end with punishments like this vs a better algorithm that does not require user participation?

[watto]

Recently I have discovered many links pointing to my 'business for sale' site from sites like 'shopping blogs', tourism, photography, medical, etc. Would Google see these links as 'un-natural'?