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I am a strong believer in the idea that comments increase the value of articles. This holds true on small blogs as well as large news sites. Comments expand the conversation, and can provide insight into the original subject matter that was lacking from the piece to begin with.

It is my opinion that the more discussion there is around any given topic, the more informed the reader is likely to be once they finish reading. That said, there are certainly plenty of useless comments out there as well. I'm referring specifically to spammy ones, and they can do more than just damage the reader's experience, but in some cases, they may even affect search engine rankings.

Google Search Quality Analyst Fili Wiese recently tweeted about (hat tip to Barry Schwartz) an article from Richard Baxter at SEOgadget, which details how some spam comments appear to have affected the ranking of a specific page of his in Google's search results.

Breaking out some Google Analytics data, Baxter shows us that one of his most popular keywords for driving traffic to his site had him ranking high in a search for that keyword until a few spammy comments about things like "hairy asian men naked," "nude female superheroes," and "large nipple galleries" were left on the page. Shortly after that, the page fell out of the rankings, but was re-included within 24 hours once the comments were finally deleted. See Baxter's article for a graphical analysis of how all of this went down.

The moral of the story here is that while encouraging comments on your articles/blog posts is a good thing, it is also in your best interest to keep spam at a minimum. Sometimes this is easier said than done, but if you know that your rankings might be affected, you will have a little more motivation.

"Comment spam, missed by Akismet," says Baxter. "Don’t get me wrong, I think Akismet is amazing, but it can miss some types of comment spam. It’s probably my fault for not adding a verification or a CAPTCHA to my comments are but I don’t enjoy the experience on other blogs personally, so I choose to leave that off."

To be clear, Google has not come out and said that these spammy comments directly lead to a penalty. Even Wiese simply said the article was an interesting read. I would hardly call this confirmation. Baxter's analysis is quite intriguing nonetheless.