Sunday, October 09, 2005

Comment Spam or How not to get Links to your Blog / Web Site

Recently I've noticed that I am getting a lot of comments in my blogs. This is a good thing, right? Wrong! Most of these comments are from people who think that leaving a comment in my blog provides them with a quality link back to their blogs or web site. In today's post I want to explain why this is not so.

There is not enough traffic to this blog

First of all, I do not get enough traffic to this blog to warrant anyone linking to me in an attempt to siphon off some of that traffic. I do not get enough traffic from people who would actually buy any goods or service that you might provide a link to in the first place. That is not the emphasis of this blog, so when you place a link for irrelevant goods and services here you will probably not get any traffic from it.

Most of the traffic to this blog is from other small affiliate marketers who are trying to earn a living like me. Those are the people that this blog is aimed at. This is one of the reasons that I am writing this post, I want to educate my fellow small affiliate marketers about Comment Spam.

Links to this blog can be clicked on, but...

One reason that leaving a comment with a link in this blog or any blog really is because it is not a very efficient way to get a link back. Not only is it not efficient, but the probability that the search engines will find your link are small. And I will definitely not link back to you, unless I know you are linking to me. If you read my post titled A Tool To Get More Traffic To Your Blog you will see that I use the refers at the bottom of this page to keep track of the web pages that link here. And as soon as you provide a link to me, the refers automatically provide a link back. Also for me to link to you the content of your site must fit with my way of doing business, that is you are not using pop ups or other underhanded methods to drive traffic to your site or blog. I would think that every blogger would do the same.

Then there is the technical reason for not using Comment Spam. The Blogger help section explains this in their "Keeping Comments Clean" post.

If you read the post above you will learn that all links placed in comments will automatically use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they'll receive no PageRank boost.

The Blogger help section also explains word verification which helps to stop the automated placing of comment spam.

So I have decided to delete the spam comments

The reasons that I have decided to take this course of action is because I realized that some of the sites that were linking here were;

1. Using questionable methods, such as having pop ups that force web surfers to click on a link that downloads adware and other malicious software. So I warn all visitors and readers of this blog, be careful when you click on a link in a comment.

2. Most of the post have nothing to do with my original post. And take the emphasis away from some of the points that I am trying to make here in my blog.

3. I am a annoyed by others trying to gain traffic from my hard work.

There is no barrier to entry to get into Affiliate Marketing. Which means that many people enter this space looking for a quick buck. I personally believe that there is no quick easy way to do this. The best way to get and keep good quality traffic is to create content that readers will want and will link to. In my mind this is actually easier then doing some of the underhanded ways that spammers do it.

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1 comment:

Dave Ryan said...

The Spam problem is being caused by the invent of the horrible automatic comment scripts out there. They work off of keywords so in smaller niche blogs things seem to be fine, but anything marketing is starting to get whacked.

You posted a comment on my blog about it and that was nice. Was the only actual comment out of like 26...

I started up a new blog to take over for the other one. You can check it out at

www.higher-profits.com

I am taking precautions to prevent spamming with this one.

I will add your blog to my blogroll as well if you want.

If you want to check out how you can make money off of linking to my blog check out

www/higher-profits.com/forum

Things will be intresting once the blog is fully launched(still in production).

Feel free to contact me and I can explain how people can earn money by linking to your blog, it insures high-traffic to your blogs ;)

-Dave