If you are like us, you get excited when you see a new comment on your blog. You can’t wait to go see what someone who appreciates your work has written to you.
You click on the comment’s link in your admin panel as your excitement continues to grow and than, in an instant, that wonderful feeling is gone and replaced by confusion. The comment you are looking at doesn’t really seem to make sense or seems way to generic and the name of the person that left it is something like “How To Loose Weight”. You start to wonder how this can have anything to do with what you wrote and what it is there.
These comments are a side effect of gray hat (or even black hat) SEO. In a nutshell these SEO and traffic generation methods are unethical. The comments that are being posted are known as comment spam and they are the bane of the blogs existence. Spammers have found a new way to annoy you (and possibly your readers) and they never even have to send an email.
For most of these spammers it’s as easy as running a script to post to hundreds of thousands (or millions) of blogs at one time. Or sometimes they are slightly more ethical and outsource to have people post slightly less generic comments on your blog. However, you will inevitably still see the name they use be something meaningless like “Free Stream Movies Online” with a link to some website of questionable intent.
So why do people do this? Where did this all come from? The idea behind this is traffic generation and search engine optimization. More so for traffic generation since by default most blog software makes comment links “No Follow”. This means that when the search engine spiders crawl the page they don’t follow that link or look at it as some sort of credible reference. The people that SPAM blogs with these comments are doing so to millions of other blogs in hopes for a small percentage of clicks back to their website.
This practice is shady, annoying, and highly not recommended to any of our clients. Leaving comments on other blogs that relate to your website is great, as long as they are genuine comments that grab peoples attention. Even if the SPAM filter I use on my blog (and enable on all Lawyer Website Solutions‘ customer’s blogs) wasn’t there and I did publish these comments – most of the readers of this site wouldn’t click on the links anyway since they don’t captivate anyone or in some cases, don’t even make sense.
So, now you know why you get comments on your lawyer blog that make absolutely no sense. If these type of comments make it past your Akismet blog comment spam filter, do the world a favor and do not post them.
Tags: Comment SPAM, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Networking, SPAM
