Spamming is Not Good SEO

by John S. on November 2nd, 2009 // Filed Under » SEO

We’ve all been there at least once. You open your blog to check for comments and find a handful fo spam sitting staring back at you. Or maybe you’ve checked your spam folder in case any real comments were misfiled and become shocked at the jumble of links and keywords staring back at you.

And then there’s what I call grey-spam. It’s kind of like spam, but not exactly.

A friend of mine has a small personal blog where she mostly writes about family life. It’s tiny, but it’s built up a piece of pagerank over the years. Which makes her a target for spam. Most of it is the obvious kind, but there’s one company that tries to walk the line between commenting and spam on her blog.

Every few days she finds a few more comments from the same company. Often different email address and sometimes different IPs, but the name is always the name of a printing company and it always links to that compnay’s website. But the comments are great. They’re well thought out, related to the post, and they even seem to remember details of her kids’ lives (in a good, regular reader sort of way). Yet they are always trying to link to the printing company.

Obviously it’s a real person (or several) leaving these comments. They have even put effort into their commenting to build a connection. But every time she sees the name of the printing company rather than a real person’s name, she marks it spam.

We all know that getting links back to your blog or site makes you look good for the search engines. Especially targeted links that use the name or keywords rather than just “click here”. And commenting is a great way to get a bit of linkjuice flowing your way. But spamming, that just won’t cut it.

Imagine if that same printing company made an effort to leave these same comments and used real names. Even real names that linked back to the website would have been better. Then, after leaving all of these comments the company sends her an email asking if she would give them some link love. Chances are she would have loved to because there was already a connection built through the comments.

We’ve all probably been tempted at least once to try to get some SEO link love from commenting, and some can get away with it easier than others. Spamming, however, will most likely get your comment deleted. Worse it could get your blocked from a potential great connection.

Think, don’t link.