Link Spamming for Blog SEO
If you are the one that maintains the company blog, you know that your comments get jammed with cheap spam. Which is not a big deal if you use Akismet. But still, it is a little irritating to see all the auto generated comments in your spam filters when you log in.
What’s worse is that I actually stop and check out a few of these links from time to time. Because they are not all porn and pharmacy sites. No sir, many of them are small businesses trying to promote their website. Mortgage companies, real estate agents, lawyers and retail companies. In other words, regular companies just like you and me.
Spamming a million blogs with cheap software every day in the hopes of getting a few backlinks. Probably based on a shallow promise from a really long and really convincing sales letter. Or even a recommendation from a colleague.
Sad.
Because what they don’t know is that it’s really more likely that using these software programs and automated SEO sites is hurting them more than it is helping them. Because it is blasting their links willy nilly all over the internet without any concern where they are going.
think about it for a minute. Do you want your law firm linked to adult blogs? Or Hate blogs? For that matter, do you want your site linked to other websites that are not even remotely related to you or your business?
I know, some of you are actually saying, “yes, I do want links. Thank you very much. We really, really need traffic and we don’t care where it comes from…”
But you should care. Because inappropriate backlinks do not help your site at all. They hurt you site. Guilt by association my friends. In this case, some of the content contained on the sites that link to you carry over to you. Your website is directly defined by the content of these sites. I won’t go into it today, but you can look up “Google Bowling” and see just what can happen by having bad sites link to yours.
As far as the traffic goes, why would you want traffic that is totally irrelevant? I’ll be honest with you, I’m a statistics nut. I love looking at my AWstats website statistics each and every day. I like seeing the increases and I like knowing when there is a decrease.
But I also look to see where these visitors are coming from. Because that’s important too.
I don’t want crap traffic. I don’t want traffic that has nothing to do with blogging or business. Because it doesn’t help us or our company. It’s wasted bandwidth and totally unproductive.
This is why when working on building your backlinks, you need to build them in places that will help your overall SEO. You need to build them in places where, if you do get some visitors, they will likely be visitors that are interested in your products or your services.
At the very least, you want those links to show the search engine spiders some relevancy. To build the authority of your website.
So here is my advice folks. Please don’t use automated software to blast a million blog comments. It’s not the correct way to build your backlinks and it is not the way to work on effective blog SEO.
All it really does is make more work for lots of blog owners. Making them spend more time cleaning up their comments and monitoring them. The links that you do get really aren’t that great.
In the end, all that happens is that you have dropped a few bucks on something worthless. Or even worse, something that you paid for that in the end is costing you more money than you ever imagined.
Tags: automated software, Blog SEO, link spam, seo
August 25th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Reading over your instructions on how to not spam people in your blog got me to thinking about spamming that occurs in the comments you receive. We have had quite a few spammed comments on our company blog, marketyourselfsmarter.blogspot.com and have to constantly monitor it. However, I am running into a problem where I now would like to reach out to the blogging community beyond posting on my own blog.
I would like to promote an employee survey that our company produces to other bloggers who are interested in business and careers etc. I don’t want to spam people. I want it to be helpful and not seen as junk. What is the best practice when promoting such information that is non-monetary?
Thanks.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Hi Aimee,
throwing in that ‘non monetary’ catch at the end makes it tough. But you can get your message out there without being spammy. Writing legitimate comments, like the one you made above, and asking people to participate is not spammy in my opinion. If (you knew there was going to be an ‘if’) it is on topic for the post you are commenting on.
Another way to get participation is to be a participant yourself. Get involved in forums that relate to you and your business and ask those users to be a part of your survey.
Also consider the ‘Answers’ websites. You could post a question there, with a link back to your survey, asking this very same question. Not only will you get some good promotional advice, but you’ll also get people that will in fact take the survey.
Be creative, think outside the box, and you’ll come up with a million ways to promote without having to resort to link spamming.
Thanks for commenting. I hope to chat with you again real soon.
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(so read some more posts and make some comments…