All Entries in the "Blog Spam" Category

Can Spam Comments Hurt Your Blog’s Rankings?

SEO Gadget wrote a blog post about comment spam affecting his rankings. Of course, the grand conclusion is that spam comments hurt his rankings. I can understand where that conclusion came from. I also agree. It can, and does, happen.

Search Engine Optimization Journal’s conclusion is that those comments were harmful because they were porn-related content. That’s possible too, but doubtful. One of the issues regarding spam comments, as pointed out by Scotland SEO, is that they are supposed to be nofollow.

It doesn’t matter is blog comments are dofollow or nofollow, the search engines will treat them the way they want to and you can’t afford to let the bad links hurt your site’s reputation. That’s why comment moderation is so important. It’s also why you need to keep a close eye on which types of comments get through on your blog. We at BCP automatically delete the following types of comments when we spot them:

• Porn links
• Obvious keyword-spam with several links in the body of the comment
• Comments where the commenter used an obvious incorrect website URL
• Comments with dead or broken links, particularly in the website URL field of the comment form
• “Feel good” comments that add no value to the discussion

Some comments are helpful; some are not. We try to get rid of the bad ones and keep the good ones. Otherwise, your blog can suffer in the search engines. If you aren’t sure which comments have value and which ones don’t then you might be better off letting someone else manage that aspect of your blog. That’s what blog managers do.

How To Kick A Blog Spammer In The N*ts

If you’re like me you hate blog spam. But occasionally I find a spam job so funny I have to publish it. Well, funny isn’t exactly the best word; it’s more like amusing. But anyway. I want to approve the comment for entertainment value (and because it contains important keywords in the comment, which help me with my SEO), but I don’t want to pass any link love on to the spammer. Why help them out?

So here’s what I do:

• Click on the comment to edit it (WordPress allows this very easily)
• Delete the URL in the website address box
• Create an editor’s note at the bottom of the comment saying why you deleted the URL so that other would-be spammers can see it and so that your regular readers can get a laugh
• Publish the comment

Real simple recipe. Martha Stewart would be proud. Now for the example. Click the link below and you can see how I kicked one blog spammer in the gonads by approving his comment but not giving him any link love.

Does Your Blog Have A Purpose?

When Do You Approve Comments

After managing nearly 100 blogs in the last couple of years I’ve narrowed down blob comments to three types:

• Spam
• Legitimate Comments
• Well-meaning people with little to contribute

Almost all comments fall into one of these three categories. I always approve legitimate comments from real people. There’s no reason not to. I don’t always delete spam, but I usually do. I approve it only when the comment actually contributes to the thread and when I’m confident that my blog readers won’t be taken to a site that might harm them. They may be annoyed the sales message, but they won’t be harmed.

With well-meaning people, it’s difficult to know just when to approve the comments. I try to give the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes a comment is just so off-the-mark that I treat it like spam.

Approving comments is something that comes from experience. The worst mistake a new blogger can make is to approve everything. Some comments are just plain harmful and they could lead to a diminished benefit to your users. Exercise some critical thinking here.

Should You Splog Or Blog?

There is a huge prejudice against commercial blogs in the blogosphere. And there’s even a racial epithet equivalent that seems to shut down conversations quicker than a Republican press conference. It’s called a splog. This blog may even be one.

According to Wikipedia, master of all knowledge (note the sarcasm), a splog’s main purpose is to increase the PageRank or backlinks of related blogs. In actuality, those benefits only go so far.

Another defining characteristic of a splog is that it is made up of “fake blog posts.” I’m not sure what a “fake blog post” looks like. I do know that this blog post is very real.

I think sometimes a legitimate blog is characterized as a splog because the person making the declaration doesn’t really understand the purpose of the blog in question. What if a blog is written by a real human being who writes original content yet uses keywords, links, and other SEO tactics typically associated with sploggers and their spammy creations? Is that blogger a splogger or a bona fide blogger?

Distinctions can sometimes be hairy. Or harrowing.

The problem with Wikipedia’s definition of splog is that it doesn’t allow for some middle way. Many professional bloggers with custom designed blogs and unique, original content in every post are fine bloggers and human beings. They are good business people who understand their business model and try their best to provide a good user experience. But they aren’t making any money. It isn’t because they aren’t writing good material. It isn’t because they aren’t targeting the right market. Primarily, it’s because they aren’t selling. And this is where it gets hairy.

Thanks to the uprise in social media and the inherent dislike of blatant marketing messages online, which are understandable by the way, it has come to be expected that blogs will not be used as direct marketing pieces. The problem with this thinking is you are running a business. You want to see a return on your investment, don’t you?

Whether you spend $10 or $2,000 on building your blog, you want it to earn you some income. And that’s the bottom line. The difference between a splog and a blog could be your ROI. If you are writing a blog the way that many professional bloggers tell you to write it and you aren’t seeing a return on your investment – counting your dollars and your time in your expense calculation – then you probably need to change what you are doing. I’m not saying you should become a spammer, but you might want to employ some stronger closing lines and use sales and lead generation tactics to get people to contact you for business. You might even employ a ghostwriter. But whatever you do, you want your blog to make you some money.

Spam Control: What Should Be Done?

An interesting discussion took place over the weekend at PoeWar regarding one blogger’s drastic approach to spam control.

The controversy started when one of Naomi Dunsford’s readers took offense at her approach to the topic. He admitted that he wasn’t offended that she stopped people from commenting on her blog. He was offended at her “tone”. OK, that’s fair.

Here’s the situation in a nutshell. A blogger ended her comment policy and made it public by stating why – in rather harsh language. This made on reader angry and he posted a blog post on his blog stating why he was angry. His position: No blogger should ever stop letting readers comment. Those are the two extremes. John Hewitt, and I, fall in the middle. That is, we believe it’s a policy that each blogger should make on their own. But when should you decide to disallow comments on your blog?

What Kind Of Comments Do You Get?
First, let’s take an interesting detour into the kind of comments you are likely to get on your blog. I like the list of the different types of spam comments that John Hewitt created on his blog. Naomi Dunsford also has an interesting list of types of commenters here on her blog. To summarize:

Naomi’s types of commentators

• The Emoter – Naomi breaks it down into two types of emoters: Selfless and self-centered. She sums it pretty well. This guy just reacted and felt the need to comment.
• The Dissenter – Again, Naomi has noticed two types of dissenters: The genuine dissenter and the “asshole dissenter.” Again, she does a good job of covering the basics.
• The Starfu*ker (Naomi likes to swear at her audience for no apparent reason) – Two types as well: The worshiper and the upwardly mobile. She does a nice job of summing this one up too and the definition of this category is the guy who just wants to stroke your ego. Bloggers generally love these people.

Those are your 6 types of commentators according to Naomi Dunsford, but she adds a bonus type and the people you call friends are the ones who fall into that category.

Personally, I think Naomi’s list is incomplete. I would add the spammer to that list and I’d add another category for thoughtful commentator who may agree with you or partially disagree and who adds something meaningful to the conversation. He’s not your friend, but he may be regular reader. He could just be someone who performed a Google search or saw your blog post on Technorati or another blog search engine or social media site and “drove by” to take a look. He isn’t responding out of emotion, but just has a thought to add and he’s on his way again. Maybe Naomi lumps these people into the emotive category. I don’t know.

But let’s take a look at the spam category. John Hewitt does a nice job of summing up the types of spammers he has seen on his blog. Here’s the summary:

• Fake Fans
• Well-Meaning Idiots
• Jerks and Pranksters

I think these categories are pretty self explanatory, but John Hewitt’s list is also incomplete. There is one other category I’d add and that is the obviously spamming bot-type comment. These are the comments characterized by fifteen links or references to your manhood, obviously misspelled words that a fourth grader could spell correctly, etc.

My favorite type of spammer is the fake fan. I love these guys because they’re obviously fake. You know their fake because they say nothing except, “Hey, I bookmarked this great blog. Thanks. Bye.” Cool, glad you love me. Now move on.

What Should You Do About All That Spam?
John Hewitt says he gets about 2,000 spam comments per day. He’s got a very popular blog. Most of us don’t get that much. We get several hundred per day on some of our blogs, but that’s the top. How many spam comments you get depends on the age of your blog, the traffic you get, the popularity of your niche, and how often you post. What you do about it depends a great deal on your own values. Let’s take a look at the options:

• Nothing – You can, of course, do nothing and just let your spam sit. This is dangerous and I wouldn’t recommend it. You should install Akismet if you have a WordPress blog. If not then install some kind of spam catcher equivalent to Akismet. It won’t catch everything, but it will catch most of your spam. You should also check the settings in your blogging platform that require people to register to leave a comment. If you really want to get tough, require commentators to sign in before commenting, but know that if you do that then you’ll dissuade real commentators from leaving comments because some people just won’t login to leave a comment. I hate commenting on Blogger.com blogs for that very reason.

  One final thing you need to do is make sure that all comments are approved by you before they are seen by anyone else. This won’t stop all spam, but it will stop most of it.

  Another reason you don’t want to do “nothing” is because no matter how tough you are on spam, some will always get through and you don’t want your readers seeing the comments about making their manhood bigger and “driving it home”. The longer that type of spam comment sits on your blog without action, the shorter your trust and credibility will remain intact. You’ve got to do something. But what?

• Stop all commenting – You can, of course, just turn off the comments on your blog. This is a drastic approach and it works. You won’t get any spam. But you won’t get any other comments either. Do you want comments? If so, don’t do it.

  Comments are beneficial in a number of ways. They aren’t just useful to your readers. They are also useful to you, the blogger. Every comment adds new content to your blog. For each new comment that you receive on a blog post, you increase the potential for your blog (that blog post, at least) to rise in the search rankings. This is especially true if your commentators use your keywords, which they will inevitably do if they are leaving decent comments and you approve them.

  Another way comments benefit you is that your readers know that you trust them. If you trust your readers then they will trust you. It’s the reciprocity rule. Trust breeds trust. Distrust breeds distrust.

  Finally, (I’m not going to talk about community) if someone has something negative to say about you, give them an opportunity to do that on your own blog where you can answer them easily rather than somewhere else where it might have a greater impact. Of course, you can’t stop people from writing on their own blogs, in a forum, or somewhere else. But you can make it easy for people to bring up a dispute or make a point that will benefit your entire readership. Plus, it’s content. See Benefit #1 above.

• Create a comment policy – I think the most beneficial thing you can do is have a comment policy. Whatever your policy is, stick to it. Don’t make exceptions. If you require that everyone sign in before commenting then make sure that you do that across the board. Don’t make exceptions for your sister’s hairdresser. But a comment policy that is enforced can make sure that people who do comment on your blog know the guidelines you are working with and they will respect you more when you enforce them because they usually know when they’ve violated a policy. Make sure your policy is visible and easily accessible to everyone.
• Create a comment policy – Offer rewards and incentives for comments that you like.

  I’m a big fan of positive motivation. It doesn’t work with everyone, but it does work on some people. About half the population are better motivated by positive stimuli so this is a good motivator. Have a best comment on the month contest or reward commentators who contribute the most to a particular discussion. It can be anything, but make sure that it is fair and gets people to contribute positively to the community you are trying to build, if community is indeed what you are trying to build.

Final Words: When Should You End All Comments?
I think Naomi made the right decision for her blog. The reason is simple. You can see it in her own words:

In my case, IttyBiz is a blog in that it’s chronological and it’s powered by WordPress, but that’s about as far as the connection goes. It’s basically just a lecture.

If your blog is a soapbox for your rants and you don’t care what other people have to say then you don’t need comments. If you are delivering a lecture then you don’t need comments. A college professor who uses his blog to provide a deeper analysis of content in his lectures might not want comments from his students. A business person who is teaching might not want to encourage comments. It’s a decision you’ll have to make for you.

Are you selling products through your blog and driving traffic to a website where you hope people will make purchases? Maybe comments aren’t necessary. That’s OK.

Not all blogs need comments. Not all blogs should have comments. If you want to interact with your readers then you should have comments; if you don’t want the interaction then you shouldn’t have comments. But I would start the blog off with no comments allowed rather than change it midstream. Make that decision early on and people will respect you for it.

Does Your Blog Ghostwriter Spam?

While Blog Content Provider paved the way into business blog ghostwriting, there are other services up and coming. We welcome them. It keeps us on our toes. But we’ve also noticed that most of these companies charge more than we do. Recently, a competitor engaged in a spam tactic that I think you all should know about.

Trackbacking is a legitimate practice that involves linking to another blog and the post from which you link appears as a comment on that other blog. Examples of this practice abound. But there are ways to game trackbacking and scam unsuspecting bloggers into approving an illegitimate trackback that is nothing more than spam.

It happened this way for us: On our Mortgage and Real Estate Blog I recently found a trackback that needed an admin approval (I highly recommend that you set your blog settings to require approval before all comments go live). You should also visit every site by a commenter or trackbacker to ensure the site is good. If the site itself doesn’t meet your approval then don’t approve the comment or trackback. I always do this.

When I visited the trackbacking site by clicking on the URL provided, I perused the blog post of the company feigning a legitimate trackback. The problem was that there was no link in the blog post leading back to our blog. In other words, they programmed their blog software to make it appear as if they were trackbacking to our blog, but the link wasn’t there. It was hidden. That way, the search engines see it, but human visitors do not, cutting off all traffic from their blog to ours. If I’d approved the trackback then the relationship between their blog and ours would have been one sided. They would have benefited from our traffic, but we would not have benefited from theirs.

This is called cloaking. It’s a practice that all of the search engines frown upon. It’s also a widespread practice by devious webmasters who try to gain an advantage in ways that are unfair. If your blogging company engages in this practice then I highly recommend that you drop them immediately and use a company that engages in legitimate and search engine approved tactics.

This trackbacker operating under the veneer of legitimate practices was a blog ghostwriting competitor trying to target real estate agents with their services. Beware of these types of spamming operations. They will hurt your business more than help it.

Spammers Are Getting More Clever Every Day

Spammers used to just pick up your articles at article directories and slap them on a Blogspot blog with AdSense. Or they’d use WordPress and trackback to your blog in hopes that you’d approve the trackback and send traffic to click on their ads. Now they’re getting even more clever than that.

I recently found an article I wrote on a plain blog, no ads. The spammer included by author resource box with all links intact. So far, so good. But I noticed that right in the middle of the article, throughout the article, the spammer inserted nonrelevant sentences with nonrelevant links pointing to other web pages that contained their AdSense ads. How clever.

I’m sure this is in violation of Google AdSense guidelines. I know it’s in violation of article directory guidelines and search engine guidelines. If this happens to you, report the offending website to each search engine and to Google AdSense. It’s a small measure, but one that might go a long way to clean up unwanted spam.

Why Blogger Is Not Good For Business

I still talk to people who are sold on Blogger.com being a great place to host a blog. Just because it’s free. I hate to be the party spoiler (actually, I quite like spiking the punch, thank you!), but the reason Blogger.com is not a good place to host your blog is precisely because it is free.

Human error has a way of killing good grass. Sure, you can pull out the weeds one by one, but the more “free” something is the more weeds you can expect to see. And pulling out all those weeds takes time. So to make it go easier and more quickly, you have to create something to automate the process – something like an algorithm, which is a fancy word for a mathematical equation that is supposed to search out and find the weeds in a big field of grass. In this case, it’s the free blog host Blogger.com and the weeds are spam blogs.

Big problem. Google’s algorithm actually flagged legitimate blogs as spam blogs. Thousands of them. And some of them were rather high profile blogs that had been hosted at Blogger.com for a long time. If it could happen them, do you think it could happen to you?

For every day that your blog is down that could potentially be thousands of dollars slipping through a hole in your pocket. It may be just a few pennies a day, but if you don’t sew up that hole then you could lose thousands over time. That thousand dollars over the course of one year represents hundreds of thousands over time. When you consider what you could have that $1,000 do for you, earning you more in an interest-bearing account, for instance, the problem is a lot bigger than it at first seems. You can’t afford to lose even a dime to someone else’s error.

It’s better, if you can, to own the property. And since you can purchase a web domain for as little as $10 per year, why not do so? Imagine opening up a storefront on the busiest street in your town for $10/year. Would you do that? Or would you opt for the empty warehouse across the railroad tracks that gets graffiti spray painted on its face once a month just because it’s free?

Sorry for the graphic image, but that’s how serious this is. Don’t use a free host. You’re much better off paying $25-$30 per month for a secure host and $10 per year than you are using a free host that could flake out on you at any time. It’s a business blog, man. Run it like one.

Why I Delete Blog Comments

I love blog comments. Legitimate ones. Ones that make me think or provide useful information for my other readers. Disagreement even can spark great debate. I love it. But sometimes I just have to say no. When I do, I kill the comment on the spot.

I did that just a few minutes ago. The commenter had a great opportunity to be brilliant. Instead, he just wrote, “Hey, those are great facts.” And he had a legitimate website, albeit one that has nothing to do with my niche. Still, he’s a reader and probably reads this blog on a regular basis. But I dumped his comment in the trash can. Why?

Because it contributed nothing. It didn’t enlighten, it offered no new information, it didn’t ask any pertinent questions, and there was no insight that could have been helpful to anyone at all. He simply threw some words into a comment box so he could get a free link back to his blog. It was rather obvious that’s what he was doing because he put no thought into his comment. And that’s the cardinal sin of blog commenting.

If you want to leave a blog comment, that’s good. I encourage it. But follow these guidelines when you leave comments on any blog in any niche online:

• Say something intelligent about the blog post on which you are commenting
• Be sure to provide the URL to your own website or blog
• Make sure that the URL is an actual URL (avoid typos and don’t use a fake URL)
• Don’t use affiliate codes in your URLs
• If you aren’t making a comment on the content of the blog post then ask a question about the topic (bottom line: make it relevant)
• Don’t include links inside your comment unless you are linking to a relevant article or blog post that will contribute to the ongoing discussion
• If you do include a link in your comment, don’t include more than two (three at the very most)
• Don’t engage in blatant self promotion
• Provide valuable insight that will help others

Blog commenting is a great way to build links back to your own website. But do it tastefully. Don’t just try to skate by on thin ice.

When Should You NOT Approve A Trackback Comment?

The secret is out: Trackbacks make great links. And it’s a really simple thing. Someone writes a blog post that you like and you respond on your own blog. If you use WordPress, you can copy the permalink of the blog post that you are responding to in the trackback field below the Write Post field. Your blog post will appear as a comment on the other blogger’s software Admin panel. They can approve or reject it. If they approve your trackback then your blog post will appear as a comment on their blog post, giving you a reciprocal link. If they reject your comment then you will be providing their blog with a one-way link and no reciprocal link love. Should you ever do that?

You bet. Keep in mind that one-way links are more valuable than reciprocal links, especially from relevant sites. It is considered tacky to reject trackbacks just because you want that highly coveted one-way back link. The content that appears in your comments is important too, for several reasons. But that doesn’t mean you should approve every trackback. There are times when you’d want to say “No” to that trackback. When are they?

You might reject a trackback for the following reasons:

• The comment is from a known spam site – If you know that a particular site is a known spam site, even if their trackback seems legitimate, then you might not want to approve their trackback comment.
• The trackback itself appears to be a form of spam and not really a true comment – Sometimes legitimate bloggers are guilty of spam too. It might be inadvertent or blatant. Either way, you have readers to protect.
• You are being linked to from a site whose mission and purpose you don’t agree with entirely – You have to be careful with this one. Just because you don’t agree with what they are doing doesn’t mean that everyone will disagree or that their business model is a bad one. But if it is obvious that what the blogger is doing is unethical or illegal then you shouldn’t promote it.
• The site is a non-relevant site and you don’t want to lose your blog readers to a non-relevant site – Sometimes you’ll get a link from a non-relevant site and you just don’t want to lose your visitors to that site.
• The blogger linking to you links to you too often – Some bloggers just overdo a good thing.
• The trackback is inconsistent with your comment policy – If you have a comment policy and a trackback blatantly is in violation, don’t make an exception just because it’s a trackback.
• The trackback is from a site that exists primarily for advertising – If the only content on a blog or website linking to you is advertising, other than content that you created, then don’t link back to them; this is just like spam.
• The site is a malware or warez site – Don’t send your readers anywhere you wouldn’t want to go.

These may not be the only reasons you’d want to reject a trackback comment, but these are good reasons not to keep those trackback comments alive on your site. You have readers to protect, so protect them. And protect your own reputation as well.