Commenting on Blogs for SEO
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008Why oh why do sites insist on spamming this and The Travel Generation blog - adding comments that are irrelevant basically to trying generate links and traffic to their site. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but it does nothing for your search engine rankings effort.
Apart from the 50 or so different endless sex sites that spam us everyday I recently got a comment from a hostel in Adelaide promoting themselves (badly) and another from an SEO company in Los Angeles doing the same. These comments added nothing to the context of the discussion (in fact, in the case of the Adelaide hostel it was in the wrong post - they could have generated traffic by at least saying something of interest in a relevant post).
So why do sites continue to spam us? Well there is probably two main reasons - the first, is in pursuit of links I expect. Unfortunately to these there is nothing but bad news. Nearly every link in the comments on all blogs has a “nofollow” tag on it. This means that the blog owner is telling the search engine to not follow or count this link - precisely to not reward spammers. It is in fact the default setup in Wordpress and other blogging software so blogs have it without even realising.
The second reason would be to drive traffic to your website. This is a fair practice and is based on the idea that if I contribute sensible and valuable points to the conversation people may be interested in my stuff and visit my site (I know I do if I am reading something of interest and I see a relevant commentator). But the point is relevance and interesting. Shoving random self promotional comments in (eg Nice Site - I will be sure to be back + link to my travel site) will not get you traffic! Moreover, it is more than likely to get you deleted.
On all our blogs we run a little application called Akismet and this catches 90% of all the porn comments and a majority of others - but the occasional one slips through. More than anything it is simply a case of frustration, taking me a few minutes everyday to go through and delete the ones that were missed, and equally to trawl through the spam for valid comments that have been caught by accident and reinstate them. Spam comments on a blog make the site look unprofessional and detract people from reading it so you have to keep on top of them, but similarly if a commentator makes a comment they get equally frustrated if it does not appear on the site in a timely fashion so you have to be on top of your spam folder also. The more spam the harder both these tasks are.
So, a desperate plea to all spammers - please piss off. Employ a real SEO company that will get you legitimate traffic instead of using rubbish tactics that don’t work.
