Accepting Comment Spam
July 13th, 2007 · by David Bradley
In the past, you have focused on avoiding comment spam on your blog using tools like Bad Behavior and Akismet. These coupled with wary moderation allow you to stave off the cr*p flood of phentermine, tramadol, lager breast, and bigger member spams that hit your comment queue in a regular tsunami of spams. However, times change, now a newish company Buy Blog Comments is offering to add comment spam professionally to blogs across the globe, for a fee. Several blogs such as ProBlogger (who describes it as sick) and PureBlogging have come down hard on the idea. The company claims that multiple placed spam comments (it costs just $19.99 for 100 apparently) will somehow boost the SERPs (search engine results pages) of the sites to which the spam comment links.
I’ve never understood the point of comment spam, at least as far as SEO (search engine optimization) goes.After all, Google basically ignores links on pages that are below about PR4, so a comment on a typical blog post is worthless in terms of draining PR juice from a site. Okay, there is a vague possibility that eventually the spammed blog will gain some pagerank for individual posts, but there are millions of blogs out there it is just so unlikely that a random workaday blog is going to rank highly for anything.
In contrast, multiple comments on a site like Significant Figures that runs the Top Commentators Plugin will allow a dedicated commenter to get their link right on to the blog homepage (which is a PR5). Now, if you were unethical that plugin would be the way to go to game sites like this. Of course, Akismet and a wary and sharp-eyed moderator will see right through the cr*p-flood, anyway.
Actually, there is a flip side to all of this. If those guys are being paid to spam, then presumably they are going to use their brains and actually read an item, if so, then they might actually add an original thought to a post, stimulate further discussion, and make many blogs more dynamic as a result. It could turn out to be a good thing for the blogosphere. The price paid will be the inclusion of a worthless text link to some spurious site that you as moderator could edit out anyway!
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8 responses so far ↓
I guess we will just have to wait and see the “quality” of these paid comments. I just don’t see anyway they could be anything other than the general, non-specific, “Hey great post. I completely agree.” type of comment. In my opinion, that doesn’t doesn’t add to the discussion.
At just 10 cents a comment, it’s not going to be rocket scientists making these comments.
My bad… that should have been 20 cents a comment.
20 cents…indeed
Funny you should mention those complimentary, as opposed to complementary, comments, I’ve got a post about that very subject on Monday. Watch this space…
The only thing I can think of is that comments do get indexed so there may be some benefit there. I’ve gotten google search traffic on my site as a result of reader comments so I suppose there may be some small effect.
Personally, I hope Google and other search engines will step in quickly and bury results for Buy Blog Comments. They’ve already taken action against Text Link Ads which is a far more legitimate organization so why not obvious spammers?
Comments may be indexed but that doesn’t mean they pass on pagerank and if they have zero pagerank anyway then there’s nothing to pass on. SEO is not, as you know, about getting traffic from random sites, it’s about boosting rank in the SERPs
That last point is a good point; while the spammer is there, they might as well as write something original.
After all, they must have taken the the time to select the ‘blog as being appropriate in first place, right?
Additionally, I can’t see how this will run smooth with the search engines, since they’re on the look-out for duplicate content anyway.
So there’s a fair-to-good chance they’ve got their filters set to stun on comments, too.
But listen to us! Trying to apply common sense to a practice that exists only to extort and exploit…
Like ye said t’other day.
“they’ll do owt bar werk”
I couldn’t possibly claim ownership of that particular pearl of wisdom.
That honour rest with my old dad…
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