April 25th, 2010 by Nick

Blogging can be an extremely effective way of increasing traffic to your website, not to mention creating a positive brand image and generally just getting your company or services out there. Some people may just blog occasionally or when there is a news story, whereas for others it is a full time commitment and part of a larger social media optimization strategy. If you are one of those companies who use blogs as a crucial part of their SEO then you have no doubt put a lot of time, effort and dedication into building up an online social network and creating effective blogs.

One of the greatest things which makes a blog successful is comments about the topic. Comments are relied on heavily by bloggers and a good blogger knows how to spark a reaction, whether it be good or bad. All blogs are available to comment on or are linked to other social networking sites such as Twitter to enable more people to see what is being said about your blogs. Comments and tweets create conversation amongst people, thus creating more awareness of your blog and getting your work noticed as much as possible.

After all your hard work and success at creating effective blogs, the last thing a blogger needs is a spam link associated with their site. Unfortunately spam links are quite easy to get into blog comments, and if you are not reading your comments properly then you may not realise they are even there. The reason a website may use your blog to create a link to their website is because they have been black listed, or because their site is classed as spam so will not show up on any search engines.

Although a slightly contradictory point to make, spam comments are not obvious but at the same time are quite easy to identify. A spam comment on your blog will usually be complementary and appear to be useful for SEO purposes, but are also a little bland. The comment is designed not to spark too much of a reaction or rouse suspicion so that you keep it there without any further inspection. Comments such as ‘really like this blog’ are classic examples of how somebody may introduce spam into your blog comments. This sort of comment appears harmless and is pleasant, but does not encourage people to respond or engage in conversation. Spam comments will of course always include a link back to another site and are essentially nothing but destructive for search engine optimisation.

If left undetected, a spam link on your comments can have devastating effects on your website. Depending on the nature of the website the spam link feeds to, it could result in your web pages being removed from search engines if it is though your site is associated with black listed websites. Not a good result after years of hard work.

The best thing to do is monitor your blog comments on a daily basis and be sure what comments you are giving approval to. By checking each one regularly you can easily keep on top of them and remove any which turn out to be spam before they are posted.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.