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.
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?