The title for this posting could also have been “why comment-spam still works even years after the introduction of the nofollow attribute”. Everyone who operates a blog or a website with commenting options is aware of this problem: spammers, linkmartens and similar critters who seem to be busy around the clock with unloading their unsolicited URLs. This can be extremely annoying and I am regularly amazed at the volume that even a SEO-blog, where spammers can assume that the operators are aware of this problem and its procedures, gets.

An extremely obtrusive rep has shown up in the last few weeks: Bernd Sonnensegel (Sonnensegel being german for an awning). This subject with the creative last name, who likes to also sprout his shenanigans under the name of Ingo Markise, regularly dumps his mildly thoughtful posts with reference to “sonnenschutz-projekt.de” and “raumtextilienshop.de” into the comments. After a while I was irritated enough to take a closer look.

The domain sonnenschutz-projekt.de, which was registered last year, first shows up in the Google SERPs at the beginning of May, shortly after the commentflood started. The search entries which are most coveted by the operators of the domain are not hard to find – thankfully they are provided in the comment-spam themselves. Here we have the ranking for the three keywords: “Sonnenschutz”(sunscreen), “Plissee”(pleating) and “Markise”(awning):


It is nice to see that before 05.12 the site is not ranked in Googles' Top-100 for any of these keywords. They debut at spot 30 (Plissee and Markise) and 45(Sonnensegel) respectively. After the abolition of the “newbie-bonus” there is a short fall until the comment-spam started to show its impact. Since then we can observe a continuous upward trend. The site is ranked 5th for Sonnenschutz and Markisen and 4th for Plissee, which is not a bad outcome. Though this is not much of a surprise, when we search Google for the alias “Bernd Sonnensegel” we get 6.400 hits. Sadly this is noticeable evidence that Google still has not gotten a hold on comment-spam.

I have written to Mrs. Ingrid Hartenstein, who is at the same time a textile engineer and owner of the site, for a comment and an explanation about this rude behavior. Sadly I have not received a response but I will be sure to post it here should she answer at a later time. On a side note: if we trace the IP addresses from which these comments are made we find they originated, without exception, in eastern Germany. Handesblatt-journalist Thomas Knüwer has published his thoughts about this today.

[update 08.03] The site ranking for the above mentioned domain has changed significantly since yesterday, which led me to update the graph for the three keywords:


Sonnenschutz fell from rank 4 to 49, Plissee from 4 to 44 and Markisen tumbled from rank 5 to 60. All other keywords took a similar turn for the worse. Even though we can assume that Google manually adjusted the ranking, the signal that comment-spam is intolerable is hopefully clear enough.