Blog Comments for SEO Links: A Good Practice?

Remember the good old days of SEO? Invisible text, keyword stuffed meta tags…it was so simple back then, so easy. Now with links playing the main role in modern SEO, the industry has changed dramatically. There are numerous ways to get links to your site if you are doing SEO, and goodness knows we have all tried plenty of them. One of the most common is probably by commenting on a blog. It is fast, easy and quickly indexed. Only one problem, Google just posted hard facts about comment spam on their official blog. While most of us don’t spam blogs, you may be surprised to see what Google calls comment spam.

We have all seen the comments that are just gibberish and full of spammy viagra links. These are obviously bot generated and clearly spam. But Google has now said it is spam if someone is “posting a generic comment (like “Nice site!”) with a commercial user name linking to their site.” This image should explain what they mean.

Now, Google is Google and can do whatever the heck they want. But they just crossed a line in my book. What if I leave my keywords as my name like BuyCheapXmasGifts in the image above, but I leave an intelligent comment? Is Google discounting all links in comments with keywords in them? How asinine on their part!

It is precisely because of Google that this problem exists! Think about it- if they didn’t place so much emphasis on the anchor text of your incoming links, people would happily leave their real names when commenting on blogs. But because they demand exact anchor text in order for you to rank for a key phrase, people resort to doing anything they can to get it. Goodness knows “natural” links as they call them never have the exact anchor text you want to rank for.

The best part about this post from Google is their own comments section. They approved this brilliant tidbit from one blogseotips: “If competitor use comment spam to hurt others ? how to solve this?”

And trust me, there’s plenty more of those out there, with comments from SEO, Discounted Indian Hotels, Online Medical and Filipina Dating Online. So Google really just hates when users leave keyword stuffed names on everyone else’s blogs, but don’t care about their own? By their own definition of spam they knowingly approved spam comments on their own blog post. For shame…

It is one thing to devalue a certain type of link. It is another to penalize sites for links form third party blogs. How easy would it be to destroy your competition by simply comment spamming under their name! Google should leave the policing and moderating of every individual’s blog to the owners of those blogs. And so in defiance of Google trying to tell me what is spam and what is not on my blog, I invite any intelligent comment from any reader using any name they would like to any website that is not a spam site.