You Gotta Be Kidding Me: Comment Spam
There are many webmasters, link building companies, and SEO companies who really put a lot of faith in blog commenting as a way to build links, traffic, and expert reputation. There are also quite a few of these individuals who are successful with this approach. In my opinion though, there are many more who are not successful with blog commenting.
Blog commenting strategies that fail are almost entirely driven by spammy keyword names. Even worse though are just plain useless or otherwise dumb comments. I think a good comment can overcome a spammy name, but combine a useless comment with a spammy name, and your blog commenting strategy is sure to fail.
Some of my favorite useless blog comments of recent months are:
1. "Good day! I just want to give an enormous thumbs up for the nice information you've gotten right here on this post. I might be coming again to your weblog for extra soon."
Ok, so why does this comment suck? It says nothing and promises nothing. Not one mention of the topic of the post being commented on. Oh, but the commenter "might" be coming again to my weblog. Did I mention that the commenter name/url were both spammy? (I think you probably assumed that). I guess someone might approve this comment or possibly have an auto-approve on comments, but most likely not. Chance of success for this comment: Slim to none.
2. "Most of the times blogs are the same but i think that your blog can be an exception. Bravo !" and "hi, new to the site, thanks."
Wow… really? That's all you have to say and you want a link back to your site for that? One word… No.
3. "Tired of obtaining low numbers of useless traffic for your site? Well i want to share with you a brand new underground tactic that produces me personally $900 each day on 100% AUTOPILOT."
So the person who posted this is not trying to really generate links per se. They are really thinking that I will somehow decide that their spam comment is really a great idea, and that I will act on it. I realize that the idea of spam is to blast out as much of something as possible in hopes that someone will take action. I just can't imagine the payback on this. My action is simple… click the spam link/botton.
4. "http://xxxxxxxx.com – cialis" or my other fave, the comment with 20 spam links one after another.
Again I sit here incredulously reading this type of comment. A link to an obviously spammy site (I hid the url just because) with an obviously high-spam keyword. Maybe one day I will accidently approve a comment like this. Not.
5. "I just added your blog site to my blogroll, I pray you would give some thought to doing the same."
I guess if all else fails, then the simple comment with a prayer might work. You know, if the name/Url provided with this comment was even remotely related to the blog it was posted on, I might have approved it. I'm not above helping out a fellow blogger. However, this was posted by someone pushing links for the phrase "tax attorney", and it was posted on a cooking blog. I guess there is no need for another "really?" comment on my part; you can figure that out on your own.
So why have I taken the time to repeat a lot of the obvious?
If it was that obvious then my blogs would not be full of this kind of useless blog commenting. If you are trying to drive traffic and/or rankings to your sites with blog comments, take the time to put together a moderately thoughtful comment and don't use a name like "cialis deals" or "tax attorney" or even "DUI attorney". You will be far more successful. If the person/company you are paying is doing this with great promises to you, then you would be better off hiring a reputable SEO company to do your link building.You get what you pay for.
Kent Allen has been practicing SEO since 2002, and has been running a Virginia based SEO services company for several years
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Sometime back a company wanted me to pay them $250 so they would "submit" my blog to 750 websites.
750, really? You're doing that by hand? You are paying people to respond to 750 posts and articles with thoughtful comments that will interest people enough to pay me a visit?
That companies would use Bots to spam is no surprise. That so many would sucker for this nonsense and pay those fees, certainly is.
A few months later I read the lament of a small entrepreneur who did buy the package from this company, back in his newbie days, and it wrecked his site with Google. It took months to repair the damage.
I talked with another newbie who was excited that he was getting lots of comments, and didn't understand they were fakes that could also hurt him with Google.
I, and others I know have been very successful with Commenting as a strategy, but it takes a lot of time and effort to do it correctly.
And 750 would certainly take awhile.
I don't believe Comment Links are worth a dime when it comes to building Page Rank. But used wisely, they can bring a goodly amount of traffic. And I believe when traffic comes in from a good comment that's left on a high-profile site, Google does notice that traffic, and so can work as sort of an "unofficial" backlink, if that makes any sense.
Fun Read, Kent
Rick
Rick LaPoint recently posted: Popular Blogs to Generate Comment Traffic
I have had most of the above, but the really sad thing is that most of them were submitted to the default "Hello World" post that goes with a new WP install that I had not bothered to delete! I guess the folks at WP should be flattered that so many think that the post was so useful to so many people.
[...] is sure to fail. Some of my favorite useless blog comments of recent months are: Continued at: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/bl…ment-spam.html When i make a blog comment, i don't worry about SEO but just post my view on what the blog writer [...]
Nice favorite useless blog comments… Sometimes difficult to know which spam or not, exception for no.4.
What I don't get is why the same spammers come back over and over again and post the same comments. I suppose they're using a script and not really doing it themselves, but not one of their comments has ever been approved on my blog so why bother?
I do get a good laugh over many of them though. Here's one I received recently : "Pretty section of content. I just stumbled upon your weblog and in accession capital to assert that I get in fact enjoyed account your blog posts. Any way I will be subscribing to your augment and even I achievement you access consistently quickly."
Huh? LOL!
I wonder how many people have outsourced blog commenting and don't realize this is what they're getting for their hard earned money?
Linda Stacy recently posted: Is it Really Just Business Not Personal
I spend way too much time deleting comment spam on our blog–many are near carbon copies of the examples you provided. Aside from the superfluous compliments, many contain nonsensical English — at least they're good for a laugh. I thought this one was worth sharing:
"A powerful share, I just given this onto a colleague who was doing a bit of analysis on this. And he in truth purchased me breakfast as a result of I discovered it for him.. smile. So let me reword that: Thnx for the treat! But yeah Thnkx for spending the time to discuss this, I really feel strongly about it and love studying extra on this topic. If possible, as you develop into expertise, would you thoughts updating your blog with extra details? It’s extremely useful for me. Large thumb up for this blog submit!"
Good day! I just want to give an enormous thumbs up for.. just kidding! But ain't that the truth? You would get excited to see so many comments to your post just to find out you've just been spammed! If I ever see any of our own guys do this crap, I will personally have a chat with him/her. But one thing thou clients also are often foolish enough to just go for cheap SEO deals and as usual you get what you pay for!
Great post – think I might be coming back more often to read your stuff
I have found that the simple math plugin (3+7=?) on my comments has reduced the spam massively. Either the spammers can't add up, or most of this type of comment spam is run by bots.
Interested to know why you don't have anything like that on here?
Great post, very concise and informative. I will definitely be back to get more nuggets of information. I am new to blogging, so every bit of knowledge helps! I have had only a few comments from my site, and only a few to different sites. Boy am I a "Newbie", I didn't even realize that commenting on good articles would help my site. Guess I got a lot of SEO research to do.
Thanks and keep up the great work!
Kevin Lindgren
Kevin Lindgren recently posted: Facebook Select All Friends
I have to say, one of the favourites I have come across in months is the genuinely honest one…
"Please publish this comment dude so I can make good Google ranks and get traffic. I need your help."
Honest? Definitely! But even an honest spammer irritates me.
Stacey Cavanagh recently posted: Google Tackles Low Quality Content
I guess if it didn't work they wouldn't be doing it, but I often wonder what the actual situation is like where these comments are coming from… a cubicle hive in Indonesia somewhere?
Do you think the guys leaving these comments try to find the most ridiculous things to say on purpose just to see if they get approved?
Kinda humorous really, but really a pain in the butt.
Ryan recently posted: Websites Versus Blogs- What’s the Difference
Your article made me laugh. I am so sick of the ridiculous spam comments. Like Linda Stacy said, so many honestly don't make any sense or just outright advertise. Would I ever buy anything from someone spamming my blog? Never. So why do they do it? Apparently some people are falling for it. Does anyone know of a good way to filter out more of this spam? I get tons and I wonder if it's because we use an older version of WordPress. Or does everyone get a ton of spam on their blogs?
Amber recently posted: Does Your New Business Website Sell For You
Hi Amber. I think spam has pretty much one of the expenses of doing business online. Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress do a pretty good job for me – the comments don't get posted, but I still look through them now and again to make sure no legit comments are getting blocked (and for a good laugh). On one of my blogs I use a captcha which helps a lot, but I worry that it might discourage some legitimate commenters, so I haven't installed on my other blog.
When I started my newest blog I was actually happy to see some spam. Figured at least I could be found by someone. How sad is that?! LOL!
Linda Stacy recently posted: Week in Review
That's cute, re. the spam
We experimented with CAPTCHA here but it's like software activation: punishing the good, the honest people.
Akismet catches most spam (around a 1000 spam posts/day). We check the last couple of pages every now and then but there is no way to make SURE no false positives are there.
On the moderating side I do a quick scan for "keyword keyword" comment authors. Those get deleted right away. Only real names make it through here
I once wrote a blog that just listed the silliest spam comments I received. I got bored of that in the end though.
The ones that say "I subscribed to your RSS feed" or "I have bookmarked your site, thanks" are the silliest. Like, why would anyone really say that? Making a sensible comment is really easy. All you have to do is read the blog, read the most recent comments, and if you have something to say, say it.
I have done the blog commenting thing for SEO, but if I cannot think of anything worth saying, I move on, as if it does not strike me as interesting, why would my site be interesting to others?
Nice post Kent – I used to get a ridiculous number of spam comments on my WordPress blog but since I installed the GASP plug-in the amount has reduced considerably.
When I started my blog some of them did make me chuckle but now if any slip through I just find them a complete nuisance.
Jamie Fairbairn recently posted: Google Clamps Down on Poor Quality Content
The question I have is why are people spamming messages that have a bunch of letters that make no sense at all? These types of comment spam happen daily.
What is the value to spammers who post a worthless message as such? Is it to waste my time having to delete their messages?
Kirk Taylor recently posted: Shark Tank Entrepreneurs Come Out Big
Kirk, aren't those annoying?
What's usually the case is that these messages are meant to render in a foreign language font, one which isn't installed in your computer. Your computer then defaults to a fallback font which at times means it displays utter nonsense.
At times I also believe people or systems are just scanning, collecting assesses where spam is welcome. Every day here we see a good number of one word or no word spam comments come in with the author URL being yahoo.com or google.com, for example.
What do they get when they post spamming messages anyway? Isn't that just a waste of time?