Leveraging Comments & the Spelling Police

Occasionally websites get really good comments, but if you get much exposure it is going to take a while to clean up all the overt spam attempts that exposure brings, especially if your topic is SEO...many people are attracted to SEO because they want to make money without doing any real work or creating any real value. I think that is part of why I liked it off the start.

And if you don't keep it clean, the next thing you know people who have made decent comments on your blog devolve comments to the me too level and sign their name as #1 rated Viagra mortgage poker coupon. I just went back and deleted about 30 comments from a person who cleverly hit me up today with about 10 coupon comment spams. Thanks buddy! There are some things large sites can get away with that smaller sites can not. For example, About.com has sections on some of their pages named something like also spelled as. Unintentionally, I slip a number of misspellings into this site, and get roasted frequently for it. Although, nobody has ever told me why the grammar and spelling police typically give dysfunctional useless feedback like "you misspelled a word" often without saying what word / where / how you misspelled it.

But if you left comments on your own blog not under your own name then spelling errors might be more appropriate. I have even seen some people take leveraging their comments one step further and troll on their own site to pick up other keywords, make the blog look active, or create fake controversies.

If you do not actively check out the comments it is not worth even having them on your site. As search engines get better at linguistics (and eventually they will) having a bunch of spammy comments on a site will linguistically link pages to a bunch of other spammed out sites and spammy topics. If you lose a bit of distribution here and there in a couple important channels competing sites get to enjoy self reinforcing market positions.

Published: September 22, 2006 by Aaron Wall in blogs

Comments

September 22, 2006 - 10:49pm

Ohh...
I just left one more today.
Sorry, I didn't realize you wrote this.

LOL.

Its true, I do sometimes leave relevant comments.
Aaron: you should also take a look at my new comment at http://www.seobook.com/archives/000823.shtml

from "web hosting store"

But Aaron: you should check out that site (emega.com -sorry again!) and see how well optimized it is for my keyword.) I just started promoting it 2 weeks ago, and so I am definitely looking forward to seeing the results.

But hey that (Web Hosting Store) comment was in fact very relevant, and did infact add alot to what you said. Besides it took research on my part.

I will be honost with you, I want to rank.
LOL, your not the only blog I spam: but the problem is that the other blogs (although they do not monitor comments like) never have post pages that actually have any page rank. Some of your your post pages actually have a page rank of 3 or 4.

Your post pages have fantastic ranks, and to be honost with you, the only directory I have ever found yet that is even close to as good as getting a link on one of your older post pages is godirectory.org which has page rank 3 links available for free!

By the way I am "couponsteal", remember me?

Nice: this is the 2nd time you have written about me!

Keep up the great work! (lol how many times did I say that!)

Hahaha!!!

P.S. I'll try and post some more relevant comments on NEWER posts.

To be honost posting on your blog is so worth it, for SEO, and is probably better than submitting to the directories, espacially if you wait for your post pages to age since they all catch some page rank since your site has so much damn authority!

September 22, 2006 - 10:53pm

You miss my point.

I don't want people spamming my blog for PageRank. It is annoying.

And using optimized anchor text just makes it moreso, because that "lets spam it now quick fast" shit spreads like a weed, and I don't want my site to be full of useless clutter.

September 22, 2006 - 10:55pm

Coupon Club:

You do realize that Aaron 'nofollows' all his comment links right? While there is still some value to them, I doubt it is as much as you think it is, especially since toolbar Pagerank was one of the attractive features to his post pages for you.

You are a sad, sad individual.

September 23, 2006 - 3:39am

If only Coupon Club had installed SEO for Firefox.

One of my most favorite (and Aaron's most useful) pieces of Link Bait yet.

Cheers,
Will

sam
September 23, 2006 - 11:00pm

Coupon if you took the same amount of time just writing a thoughtful comment it would not be spam.

If you are using an automated system well that will catch up to you.

You are digging a hole for yourself that will eventually cave in on you.

Just write valuable content and you wont have to spam anyone.

September 27, 2006 - 3:59am

There's a comma after "Uninintentionally" and "Although" in these two sentences:

Unintentionally I slip a number of misspellings into this site, and get roasted frequently for it. Although nobody has ever told me why the grammar and spelling police typically give dysfunctional useless feedback like "you misspelled a word" often without saying what word / where / how you misspelled it.

September 22, 2006 - 9:17am

A lot of the people who comment on my site have English as a second language and make an awful lot of mistakes. The spelling mistakes can be helpful as you mention but their grammar is also often woeful so your post makes me wonder whether I should be worried about this (they are almost all on non-commercial topics though). My normal policy with editing comments is just to leave them as long as the meaning is clear.

September 22, 2006 - 4:10pm

I've had to enable captcha to keep the spamming to a minimum. It's getting hard to casually read blog comments, or even some forums for that matter. Spin.com's forums are full of useless junk. You'd think their webmasters would police it a bit better.

The signal to noise ratio is getting worse...

Gemme
September 22, 2006 - 5:48pm

"many people are attracted to SEO because they want to make money without doing any real work or creating any real value. I think that is part of why I liked it off the start."

Funny:)

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