What not to do for Search Engine Rankings: Blog Comment Spam

8 Feb

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  is widely talked about and is something that I spend a large portion of my day to day work activities monitoring. Typically I do not write about SEO as a lot of my favorite daily blogs do a much better job than I about it.  I will have to do a future list of my favorite SEO blogs in the near future.

This evening a great garden blogger that I follow on twitter @MrBrownthumb that has a Garden blog with a PR of 4 and receives a good deal of traffic mentioned that he had been comment spammed by a mid-sized seed company, not once but twice!  Below is a screenshot of the spam comment they left. They have a lot of other options available for them to gain in SEO and I look forward to giving a couple of reasons why they shouldn’t bother with blog comment spam and what they should’ve done instead.

 

Garden Blog Comment Spam

What not to Do

WHY BLOG COMMENT SPAM IS BAD IDEA

Reason 1: Majority of Time It Doesn’t Pass Link Authority

It Doesnt Work. Blog comment spam generally links that are passed are no-follow. The few that aren’t will often get caught as this link was by the blogger. The few that do pass thru are not worth the work the time an effort or and little value they pass thru. Here is an old Youmoz post about it. You could have spent the time working on the

Reason Number 2: Possible PR Damage

The garden blogger wondered why the seed company didn’t reach out to him in first place. In fairness at least this spammer, commented on a topic that was pertinent. I am sure that you have all seen spam that is about a topic that doesn’t fit at all.

Two Easy Options Instead of Blog Comment Spam

Option 1: Blogger outreach

They could have wrote the blogger a short note about an upcoming product or recipe from their website. It likely would have went over well and they could have even asked for the specific anchor text link. This is a timely but a method that works very often.  If you don’t try this method you should.

Option 2: Leave a Meaningful Comment

If the blog commenter would have left a comment of any value, they could have contributed to the blogs discussion and likely kept the blog. However, they did the opposite an immediately let themselves show as being a spammer.

This is an example of what happens far to often, people hustling for links but doing it in a bad fashion that ultimately wont lead up to much.  I know that I have done or paid companies that have done some of this in the past and know that many marketing firms still do this as it does make link counts appear high but does little for search rankings or making your company look good.

How do you interact with blogs and what are easy ways that you get links for your blogs or websites?

 

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Shazam: Showing How Partnerships Can Fuel Awareness

8 Feb

Like most of America, I watched the Super Bowl this past Sunday. The Patriots and Giants were two teams that I enjoy watching, plus Super Bowl ads are normally pretty fun. In between stuffing my face with chips, chicken wings and various other fattening snacks, my good friend asked me “What’s Shazam?”

Shazam Super Bowl Advertise

This Logo and other forms appeared across commercials

I was a little surpised that my friend didn’t know what Shazam was as I am sure I’ve shown him the app, multiple times. Regardless, I explained that Shazam was an app that that many people use to find out a song name or artist. He was impressed by the quick showing of the app again only to be back focused on the game.

Shazam then appeared to be in almost every Super Bowl Advertisement that I saw. The also were pushing free song downloads for using the service. All of these seemed to be a great job of pushing a newer product.  It used the Super Bowl and partnerships in ads to gain access to millions of customers that likely would have never heard of the project. Shazam, seems to think it was a success from this recent press release and plans to do more.

After doing a bit of research, I have learned that Shazam has really been pushing its growth through partnership deals. They have been using partnerships during Bravo TV Shows, and recently  Movie Studios  deals.  This seems like a great way for the the mobile application to be more involved into fabric of a new level of customers. Mobile apps and web companies could all learn a great lesson from how Shazam was able to integrate itself with major brands in a way that brought a new audience.

Have you noticed the Shazam logo in recent commercials? If so, what were your thoughts on it?

 

Train Signal: Helping My Attempt At Learning IT

20 Jan

The last couple of years at the office, we have had a great deal of changes.  Gained new staff, lost old staff, saw a couple ownership structural changes and all of this had worked for the better.  Many of these changes have made me learn a lot more about all aspects of running a business.

Despite our company having been around for over ten years it still is a small business startup. This means wearing many hats sometimes to make things work.  In the past, this has caused a lot of problems and probably made us lose at times. In 2011, it finally began to click and we had best year ever with great growth and profitability. 2011 really was more wins than loses.

I was excited and looking forward to keeping this progress, when we had a slight change in plans. A key team member of the staff decided to leave to pursue a new life changing option.  Staff members had come and go but this was a big deal as it was the IT manager. This person made sure users computer issues were minimal, oversaw our servers, and worked on our CRM systems.  We have a corporate headquarters that helped guide him and lead many of the actions but at the end of the day if something wasn’t working it fell upon him to fix it.  Before this IT Manager, we had a terrible IT Manager that was never in the office that consistently made excuses to not come into the office during office hours.

My first thought was who would be in charge of our IT and help with day to day options. Soon after, I was notified that I would have to learn how to do many of the day-to-day things with major projects or issues going to our headquarters. I love computers and typically don’t have any problems with my own or dealing with companies web servers.  However, was I ready to be in charge of a user group with Microsoft exchange servers and no telling what else? I think not. I then remembered,  a friend of mine, Iman Jamali worked for a company called Train Signal that might be able to help.

Train Signal has a full line of different instructional videos for IT professionals to receive training. They have a variety of videos from basic course like Microsoft office training to VMware(Whatever that is). I have been using the trial over the past two weeks to really learn how to manage our companies Microsoft products. So far the courses for a learning in IT course have been fun with courses that are hands on to what I actually need to know.

Am I now an IT Pro in two weeks? Of course Not, but I have learned a lot. If you continued on and took all the courses, you could become Microsoft certified for sure. If you had more technical knowledge than I had coming into it you could easily become prepared to transfer knowledge to others quickly. If you are learning IT they have great products for you to check out.

It has made this transition go fairly smoothly and now I will easily be able to step in to help with basic Microsoft exchanges issues and questions. Advanced projects, I will still likely pass over to main headquarters but I can now feel a bit confident handling the small things that arise. Basics like setting up, configuring exchange servers, creating new users, and adding mailboxes are just some of the tasks I have learned.

Those were many of the basic task but I welcome you to learn more advanced tasks by trying out Train Signals. Check them out and even take a free online course “Intro to Virtualization” to see what I mean.

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