Does context matter in blog comment spam?
Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post calling into question a meeting with Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, as a grand prize for Yahoo Search Marketing’s “Ultimate Connection Contest.”
I just noticed that this post recieved a completely unrelated comment. It would appear to be backlink spam except the poster’s anchor text is “Karin.”
“Ivanka will emcee the Third Annual Inspiration Awards Gala… (date, time place) Each year, Step Up Women’s Network rolls out the red carpet and gathers 400 members, supporters, industry elite, and community…blah blah blah for another paragraph)”
What was the motivation behind this? It certainly isn’t from your typical blackhat SEO cialis debt reducer, nor does it appear to have come from someone who understands internet marketing…
Time to start my own blog PR firm?
Shh… I’ll admit, I use this technique, but not on your blog, as I comment here regularly without a link. It works nicely, so don’t go tellin everyone. hehe I think it’s fine as long as the comment is relevent and ads to the discussion in my point of view. I view it as a fair exchange of comment for link.
Comment by Marc — May 29, 2007 @ 8:10 pm
Well that comment might have been a bit spammy, but I do it while adding to the conversation. Not detracting.
Comment by Marc — May 29, 2007 @ 8:12 pm
I occasionally see similar types of not quite right comments on my blog. I suspect people are simply looking for links and the anchor text is of a secondary importance. In the case mentioned, however, it sounded like it was being done for direct promotion towards readers, not as an SEO trick. Probably the best way to discourage comment span for links is to simply ad the rel=nofollow instruction to links.
Comment by Ken — May 30, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
Marc, I understand the whole commenting for a link thing, but usually it is something really short with a mention of the actual post’s content, such as “Yeah, I agree Ivanka Trump sucks.”
In other cases the “spam” is really, really long comments. My post bashing “The Secret” has comments that are longer than my post with a link following to their writers crappy self-promotional ebook site. I figure as long as the person can be bothered to write something original and substantial I’ll let the link through.
Interestingly I noticed that Aaron Wall has just shut off outgoing links completely on his blog. I am very tempted to do this as well but feel it kills the community aspect of blogging. A nofollow, or php outgoing links combined with a google do-not-crawl robots.txt could work too.
Comment by Andrew — May 30, 2007 @ 10:03 pm
Andrew,
I’m no SEO but here is my take. Even nofollow links are valuable. They may have less value, but they still have value, especially if you have enough of them. I think they work well in an indirect manner. If you write a post about Ivanka Trump, then a commenter says Ivanka Trump sucks, then he slightly optimized your post for the phrase “Ivanka Trump sucks” if this gets a response from other commenters then the effect is increased. I think of this as the tail wagging the dog. Commenters hijacking your post for their search terms. If your page begins to rank for “Ivanka Trump sucks” then he will benefit from click throughs of users who follow his comment link, especially if the comment is attention grabbing or inflammatory. Obviously the higher your post ranks for this phrase the more traffic he will see from this indirectly. I’m sure that “Ivanka Trump sucks” is a sought after search phrase for some people. If you repeat this method a few hundred times and get a handful of referals from each, then you can get quite a bit of targetted traffic. The other thing that I think is going on here is a lot of experimentation by spammers. I mean a whole lot, and that includes lots of amateurs who take the scattergun approach. One other part of the game which may justify long comments is that you don’t want the blogger to delete your comment, so the spammer needs to make it look valuable. Like I said, I’m no SEO so I don’t keep detailed stats on these things myself, but I seem to be able to squeeze a fair amount of juice out of blog comments even with nofollow. I especially notice this with old posts from big blogs, they rank well and keep sending traffic month after month. Who cares about nofollow. I think the trick for the blogger is to have a high standard for comments, who knows whether a relevent comment is linkspam or not, that’s a judgement call. As long as its relevent and adds value to your blog, that’s what matters. Hmmm, sounds like I just outlined a method for (weak) post hijacking for SEO… haha, you might not agree though. I guess to cut this long ramble short, I’ll just say, comment links generate targetted traffic. As long as that’s true, there will be comment spam. Even if you don’t allow links, you’ll still be caught in the scattergun crossfire of plain-text spam, yet no comments is too high a price to pay in my view.
Comment by Marc — May 31, 2007 @ 9:34 pm
I do employ the technique of commenting on my favorite blogs for backlinks. However, I do not just do so randomly and simply for the link itself. I will only comment whenever I have something valuable to add to the conversation and when I have actually taken the time to READ the article posted.
Fight spam not comments!
Comment by Jonathan Franzone — June 5, 2007 @ 9:30 am
you’re right, Ivanka Trump Sucks!
just kidding. I used to get some jackass adding mulitple comments about his godawful site on costa rica real estate ALL over my frickin blog. About 3-4 days a week for several months, he’d post the same stupid comment on my site and i’d remove them. finally i gave up and had to institute comment moderation just because of that one jackass.
So there must be some value to it.
Comment by Adventures In Money Making — June 13, 2007 @ 6:51 pm