Remove comments or leave them be?

[Freelancer13]

We're finding a lot of comments that were posted by a previous company - they've been using a keyword as the comment name (UGH) and then the comments are usually generic, like "great information, will definitely be back to read more form you" - you guys know what I mean...

Now, this site is ranking well and so are the keywords. My question is, should we work on removing those comments or just leave them be and now moving forward, use the proper process - since we are doing this ourselves now.

[adventurenick]

If the site is doing well, avoid panicking - lots of webmasters freak out and go on a rampage trying to remove every link, when they should just sit back and relax. If we're talking thousands and thousands of junk comments, it's something you might want to be concerned about. If it's a lower number, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it and would focus on building quality backlinks going forward. Contacting blog owners is a nightmarish task because the sort who have blogs that auto-approve junk comments are usually not the most tech-savvy and often don't even think to include their contact info anywhere. Lots of them don't own their own domain, so you can't get their whois info that way either. If it were me, I'd put my time and energy into building good, diverse backlinks rather than spending tons of time trying to remove these links that don't seem to have negatively affected you.

[EvolveCreative]

To further confirm your feelings I completly agree with this answer. Wait until the penalty comes and then be proactive. In the meantime build high quality links.

[Freelancer13]

No, this site is doing very well, the site and the keywords. Our mistake was having this particular seo company help us with link building.

Thank you for your reply, much appreciated.

[Freelancer13]

Thank you so much for confirming what I was feeling Just needed to hear it from another in the field. I appreciate your time, thank you for responding.

[MarkScully]

If a keyword is ranking for poor quality content..then it's not a keyword worth having.

So for this reason, I would remove the comments. If they haven't already been picked up by Google's Panda update,  then expect it to happen shortly.

Even if you take a hit with rankings for these keywords, it's better disposing of the generic comments now, rather than them having a negative impact on your whole site in the future,

[TomRayner]

I think it's a very pertinent question and I think you need to be realistic about the time it would take to outreach to the webmasters about your comments and then how likely they are to be removed.

The answer to me would be "a long time" and "not very likely" - which would essentially be a waste of time considering that you could be building better links during that period.

It might make you feel a bit uncomfortable, but I'd ignore them until you get an unnatural links message - at which point, I'd outreach and get ready to disavow (so you could make a note of which comments you think might trigger this, those on unrelated sites with a lot of outbound links for instance).  Until then, I'd spend your time more wisely by optimising your site and building better links.  There is also evidence to suggest that Google might be going down the route of devaluing links on the fly, which may happen to you in the future (or may have already happens).  Should it occur and you see a rankings drop (but nothing too serious and no link warning message), it's important to have a number of high quality links built or ready to be built to replace those links devalued.

That's where I'd spend my time.