Today when I checked my mail in the morning I was surprised to see more than the usual number in my inbox, only to realise that a huge bunch of the mails are due to spam comments on this blog.
All these comments came in within 2 minutes last night. And they all went into the spam folder. SEO effect? Zero – at least for my blog. Of course, they have probably spammed a thousand other blogs in the same fifteen minutes, and been lucky enough to have hit one or two that didn’t have their spam filter on.
Another surprise came when I realized that many of these spammy comments had URLs pointing to Singapore related domains or .sg domains. A couple of them were horrid looking “made for Adsense” splogs (they still exist!), and some were legitimate company websites.
What was common was that all these sites pointed to one SEO company in Singapore – one that sold packages of “5000 Facebook Invites for USD$39.90” and “100 Facebook Fans for $49.90”!
Frankly, I feel sorry for the legitimate companies who probably paid good money to this SEO consultant to market their website. On the other hand, I think there is a need to educate some business owners and marketing professionals on how to choose a proper SEO company – what do you think?
Blog Commenting for SEO
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that blog commenting does not work for SEO. In fact, from my own observations and experience, these blog comments still work very well, despite the fact that most blogs still have the rel=”nofollow” attribute for their comment links.
However, for the comments to go through and SEO to really take effect, the comments need to be insightful and valuable to the blog owner, not random phrases submitted by a piece of software. Like many things in life, its not what you do, but how you do it that matters.