I’m continually amazed by the number of people who come to this site to build their links by posting unrelated material in the comments. Remember, I’m a social media specialist. There are few link-building strategies, legitimate or shady, I haven’t heard of. When I leave comments I make sure they are relevant, add to the conversation, keep the self-promotion to a minimum. Usually I limit my self-promotion to putting my site’s URL in the field specifically for providing your URL.
The idea behind “link spamming” is to get as many links to your own website as you can get. This can convince search engines your site is more important because you are so actively involved in commenting.
Now, if someone really does spend time reading other blogs and leaving legitimate comments then they should be rewarded in the search engines. Unfortunately, far too many others have caught on to this and take “short cuts” to put out as many links as they can without wasting time even reading your posts. I get so many link spammers that I very nearly round-file legitimate comments by mistake. Some common less-than-ethical tactics include:
- Leaving vague compliments like “I love this post! I couldn’t agree more! I’m so glad I found this site! Keep posting!”
- leaving gibberish, like: sMxfo1 aaqdaajzwccb, [url=http://xurxhkxhjsmj.com/]xurxhkxhjsmj[/url], [link=http://jahdbanbwwmp.com/]jahdbanbwwmp[/link], http://eqrmcekmtscx.com/
- Commenting in a foreign language hoping I’ll just assume it’s for real.
- Copying and pasting text from some other source, laced with links.
Because of this I’ve taken to personally moderating all my comments, at least for now. I’m hoping some of you comment spammers out there will read this post and abandon hope. But if not, I hope a few more bloggers will learn to recognize this behavior and help put a stop to it. These people are messing things up for all of us.