Get your comment spam here!
I so have to laugh. We just took over a local website and I was in poking around. Of course, it’s in my favorite format, WordPress, so I was right at home quickly. I immediately noticed the amount of comment spam.
What is Comment Spam?
For those of you that don’t see blogs/websites as I do – and that’s probably most of you – what IS comment spam or blog spam? Comment spam is the end result of automated campaigns for SEO purposes. Short simple and sweet.
On Page SEO
All sites survive by their overall popularity on the web. This is gauged by the actual on-page SEO elements including title, meta descriptions, arguably meta keywords, keyword phrases within the content, heading tag content, hyperlink content including the anchor text, pictures, picture placement, picture labeling and filenames, and more. Needless to say, there’s a lot more to making a page “good” than just tapping out some drivel. Honestly unless you’re in a zero competition niche, it’s hard to get a site ranked decently unless you DO have some clue what the search engines look for in your pages.
Off Page SEO
The second way is to what is called “off-page SEO”. Off-page SEO refers to the things that are external to your site – links back to your site – links to your homepage and links to inner pages most often referred to as “deep linking”, directories that mention you, authority sites that have links to you, Web 2.0 sites that refer back to your site, social networks, social bookmarks and more.
One of the ways to get backlinks is commenting on forum pages. In this case, there are about 500 comments sitting there in spam and trash. So the site apparently has GREAT exposure for some terms. That’s the great thing! The bad thing is that it attracts the spammers – usually bots of some sort sent out by the spammers to automatically slap comments onto a page that allows commenting and most importantly with a backlink to their site. THAT is the key.
Now, since we actually DO website SEO in Clayton NC, I have to make it clear that we understand why we see this stuff. And there are automated tools to protect your blog/website from such comments. These tools usually catch 95% of the stuff which makes a webmaster’s life easier. And since we know how the SEO game works, we forgive these incursions into our sites – I suspect we’ve had our share of comments that were NOT deeply thought out on a page that we wanted a backlink from.
Ideally comments should be relevant to whatever is being discussed on the page, but bots have no conscience and even less understanding of what IS being discussed on a page – so the comments we normally see are irrelevant in pretty much all cases. Honestly the irrelevance is NOT so bad when I see it, however…
If you’re going to spam, for crying out loud, DON’T misspell simple words, huh?
If you’re citing an acilrte or a publication…
Seven friends and I had dennir at…
I am dlntfiieey coming back and bringing my family with me.
For the love of GOD, man – check your spam, huh? Seriously, if you’re not a native English-speaking spammer, run it through some sort of spell check. I’ll forgive you for the rest 🙂 Might even let some of it get in there with decent spelling if it was even close to relevant or at least interesting!
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