SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is often thought of as some mysterious and magical form of voodoo that only the highly gifted can accomplish. Well, it’s not really that but you do have to have knowledge of how search engines work and how they rank websites.
One of the best ways to get a high ranking website is to have many other sites linking to yours and that is why links are so important. There are “good” links and there are “bad” links so you have to be careful in that department. Proper link building really is an art form, and if you’re going to hire someone for that you better be sure of their methods.
A little over a week ago I received a comment on a different blog that I manage. That in itself was kind of odd, as the blog receives very little traffic. When I logged into the admin area of the blog, this was the comment waiting for me:
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Now the blog and post that this person commented on is totally unrelated to SEO or marketing, yet this spammer commenter felt compelled to plug his site and insert no less than 20 links in it, with the lion’s share directed to verifiedfile.com (I am not linking to them at all, even with a “nofollow” link).
If you read some of what this commenter said, you’ll see that they claim their “service” isn’t spam; they say that they are penetrating online established communities relative to your website, product or services. I’m sorry, but I fail to see how an article about a sale on wholesale fashion accessories is relevant to a mass commenting service.
After seeing this comment I just had to visit the website of this obviously elite SEO service. While I was there, I used their contact form to briefly express my displeasure with their methods. This morning I received a reply.
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Did you notice the little smiley at the end of Daniel’s response? I take that to mean that they feel spamming blogs and forums has fantastic SEO benefits, when it really doesn’t. Do people or companies seriously think that blog comment spamming is an effective method to achieve higher rankings in the search engines?
First of all, blog comments like these are very unlikely to ever get published. Most blog owners have some form of spam protection enabled (like Akismet) which catches comments like this. Therefore, this kind of commenting would have to pass a human review in order to be published. Do you think it would pass?
Secondly, if a spam comment is somehow published, you can be assured that the links in it are all “nofollow” links. Nofollow links are the red-headed step children of regular links and are practically worthless for ranking purposes.
Lastly, what do you think this kind of “marketing” says about you, your business or your product? This is perhaps the most important thing to consider. If you are a legitimate business with a legitimate product or service, then resorting to spamming websites with your message will just destroy your chances of any positive branding. On the other hand, if you’re just one of the many people trying to operate a “cheap viagra” business from some obscure forum post, then by all means, keep up with the spamming. Your reputation can’t be tarnished anymore than it already is.
Real SEO results are obtained through hard work and ethical means. Don’t let anyone tell you any different; spamming is not a form of SEO.