Years ago when I started studying and doing SEO, I came across a lot of varying opinions on the best ways to rank a website in search results. The most common discussions at the time were between "black hat" and white hat" strategies. You know the difference in the two - black hat uses tactics that are shady or underhanded to achieve results, where white hat follows best practices and Google guidelines.

On August 17, 2010, Rand Fishkin wrote an article about a long-standing complaint outlining the effectiveness of webspam and how it appeared to be making a comeback. He points out a number of strategies that raise concerns, but I want to point out one that I have been particularly frustrated with... blog comment spam.

As an SEO enthusiast and practitioner, I try to maintain a balance of duplicating success (not re-inventing the wheel) and staying up to date with new strategies and finding new solutions to old problems. One of the most practical ways of doing this is to try and reverse engineer successful websites. We look at link profiles (the makeup of their incoming links), domain information, social media, and website content/code to understand how websites rank highly for competitive keywords within different industries. This approach is taken to identify potential link partners, understanding "relevance" and understanding industries. With tools like Open Site Explorer and others, we can tell a lot about a website and its influence on the web.

I started looking at some really competitive keywords recently and reverse engineering some of their content and link profiles, and the results were, well, underwhelming. Frustrating is actually a better word. I looked at 12 top ranking sites across a few industries for competitive analysis and found a surprisingly strong correlation between the amount of blog comment spam and the high number of linking root domains. Some of the results were actually for SEO companies what were using the blog comment strategy for themselves and for their clients. And most of these comment spam links were on strong domains (according to OSE) and appeared in the first several pages of the results on Open Site Explorer. Not surprisingly, the websites I checked all seemed to be clients of a few SEO companies that were using blog comment spam for their own SEO and link building for their clients.

Here is an example of the types of comment spam I found.

As a strategy itself, commenting on blogs is not a bad strategy. It can actually be a very good strategy if you are offering insight or relevant content. What I am talking about is blog comment spam.  Many were unrelated comments or had badly broken English (possibly even "spun" content) and offered little or nothing as a contribution to the article.  

I was very tempted to screen-capture and document the companies I found doing this because some of the comments were so bad it was humorous, but there has been some strong debate on whether or not you should "out" others in the industry so I will refrain from doing that. Instead, I would like to offer a solution, and then some best practices for those wanting to use blog communities for link building.

First, the solution:  Bloggers. Please Moderate Your Comment Sections.

There is a local web design company in the southeast that has an article posted on how to use tools to reduce or eliminate comment spam, but the ironic thing is, the comment section is littered with spam links. Yes, there are tools to block spam, but as with email filters, sometimes things get through. If you run a blog, don't you have a responsibility to your readers and to your community to moderate comment spam?

There are 505 results on Wordpress.com for plugins that help battle spam. Every other blogging platform has its own share of tools as well. It is tough to see SEO companies (and what looks like some in-house SEOs) taking advantage of comment spam to generate 1000s of incoming links. The results are great in the short term as long as bloggers leave the spam intact, but you will lose those links if/when they get edited or deleted. I hope to see more bloggers utilize tools to prevent comment spam, and take responsibility for their content and moderate their comment sections.  

A lot of blogging platforms make use of the rel="nofollow" attribute for links in the comment section, but from looking at link profiles in OSE, most of the spam links end up on blogs that don't use the no-follow attribute.  There is software out there to find relevant blogs based on keywords and that use followed links in the comments.  As with all good things, they can and will be abused.  From what I gather, the blog comment spammers are parsing blog data by keywords and followed links, and submitting tons of useless comments to gain incoming links.  If these aren't moderated, then it can be an effective off-colored SEO strategy.  It is easy to see how Rand and others are concerned about the effectiveness of web spam because practices like this can be hard to overcome in the short term by doing things the right way.  As a company that provides SEO services, it is hard to explain to your clients that several sites are outranking theirs because their competitors are using strategies like buying links and blog comment spam.   

So, what are the takeaways from this for the burgeoning SEO? You can generate a lot of good links by participating in blogging communities and leaving comments, but be active in the community and leave comments that are at least relevant to the article. In doing so, you will be gaining links that are going to have staying power and actually add value to articles. If you go the other way of spam comments, there is always a chance your links will get deleted or filtered out, which will hurt your SEO on the long run. Even on SEOmoz, I occasionally see some spammy comments get added, but they are almost always moderated and deleted. When you leave a comment, you should ask yourself two questions: does this look like spam, and would you like to have this comment on your own blog?

I can't wait to see the conversation about this in the comments. Just don't leave any spammy links :)