Google sanctions on comment spam pages: traffic changes

I woke up early in the morning and decided to check the traffic on one of my sites. After looking at the statistics for the past week, I saw that the site has dropped traffic very much.

I was shocked and started the analysis. I compared the first half of June with the second half of May and saw that traffic fell by about 4.5% . Statistics:

It was not a very pleasant fact and I decided to see detailed statistics on traffic sources:

It’s very good that you can quickly find everything you need in Google Analytics . Most of us use this software every day, but the real value of it is beginning to be understood when something bad happens to the site.

Going deeper into the statistics by keywords it turned out:

What happened?

The reason was in the comments: spam was missed by the Akismet plugin. I have nothing against this plugin and I think it is great, but there are some types of spam that it misses. Perhaps this is my mistake, since I have not added CAPTCHA in the comments.

Here is what was on the page:

All links led to domains from which all links were received from spam . As you can see, the comments were left on June 3 at 6.10.

So, the entire search traffic for the query "Virtualbox" collapsed in 24 hours and it lasted until I cleared comments on June 15 at 7 o'clock.

Here is the screen for issuing Google before comment spam:

but after spam:

It's good that the page was added to the issue 24 hours after the comments were cleared . Here is a screenshot of how traffic changed over time:

So, the traffic returned and the site is free from comment spam. What did I learn from this lesson?

It was interesting to find out for how much the page will fly out of the index and get there again after spam cleaning.

As it turned out - 24 hours . It is very interesting what will happen if comments contain not only spam in the form of words, but also links enclosed in nofollow.

Basically, it's very easy to check.