No-Follow Comments from 2010

[CleanEdisonInc]

An old SEO consultant left a lot of comments with exact anchor text links on non relevant blogs back in 2010.

At this point most of them are no-follow, but I'm obviously still concerned they are damaging. Is the no-follow enough? Or should I still work to remove them? Is the time worth the effort?

Thanks,

[CleanEdisonInc]

I just looked at my organic traffic since 2009 (ugh, not the trend you like to see).

The biggest drop was in April 2011 (Panda 2.0 (#2))

There was a small drop but immediate recovery in December 2011 (Panda 3.1 (#9))

Another drop in June 2012 (Penquin 1.1 (#2))

Another drop in September 2012 (Don't really know - Panda updates 3.9.1 and 3.9.2)

It's been steady/slowly increasing since then.

The comment (and other) spam links are in the hundreds or thousands (By my best estimation)

What do you think? Obviously, I need more good and less bad, but do you have any advice on what/where to focus?

[TakeshiYoung]

Penguin isn't a manual penalty, it's algorithmic. See if your traffic drops correspond to previous Penguin releases:

http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

I'm not sure how extensive this comment spam, but unless it's on the scale of hundreds or thousands it's probably a good idea to just ignore them, and focus on things that will have a positive impact on your SEO, such as creating new contents and building new links.

[CleanEdisonInc]

Thanks for answering.

We haven't been manually penalized, but have definitely seen a drop in nearly every important ranking.

I was under the impression that the disavow tool will just tell Google to mark them no-follow anyway. It's not like they are going to manually remove them or anything. Am I wrong?

[TakeshiYoung]

Have you been hit by Penguin? If not, then don't worry about it. If you have been hit, then you can disavow the links in Webmaster Tools.

[mihaiaperghis]

You shouldn't worry about them if they are marked with nofollow.

Nofollowed links will not damage your rankings because, as the Google's support page says, the nofollow attribute "means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links".

Cheers!