A Useful Tip for Blog Owners Regarding Spam

Posted on Aug 8, 2010 in Useful Stuff

If you’re pretty savvy when it comes to blogging and ranking your sites in the search engines, and making money and all that other ‘stuff’, this post probably won’t tell you anything you don’t already know.

For the rest of you, who just want to go on blogging about your daily business and/or are still relatively new to the whole thing and are already sick to the high heavens of having to clean out your spam folder every two minutes, read on.

You might think there couldn’t possibly be anything useful in a spammy comment appearing on your blog. In fact, the only use it has is alerting you to the fact that yet another idiot hasn’t figured out how backlinking works or how to fire up their latest piece of autocommenting software shit and use it properly.

But see, you’d be wrong. Yes, I know that might be a hard pill for you to swallow, but consider the possibility for a moment and you might actually discover a very sneaky trick used by a lot of marketers. (this might be a job you want to outsource however, cos it really is soul destroying lol).

Sites that get lots of comments are seen as populars by search engines. After all, if folks are taking the time to comment on your site, you must have something worth commenting on right? The more popular your site is the more attention it will get from search engines.

But you don’t want those search spiders crawling your site and seeing mention of those nasty ‘words’ do you? (you know the words I mean and if you don’t, email me and we’ll discuss it offsite).

You could of course, log out and post comments yourself, but then they’d all come from the same IP address so that wouldn’t look too good. You could ask your mates to comment, but again, when it’s the same IP’s showing up all the time, the search spiders are going to get a little bit suspicious.

So here’s what you do instead.

Edit your spammy comments instead of deleting them. Remove the links (or better yet, swap them for one of your own affiliate links), alter the email address (just stick a number in there), and rewrite the comment to be as awesome and relevant as you want.

You don’t have to do this with all of them, some will be easier and take less time to edit than others. Especially the more generic ones such as, ‘hey, good post’.

Search engines will think you’ve got something worth talking about, genuine visitors will be more inclined to join in when they think there’s already a real conversation going on, and the end result will be higher rankings, more visitors and more genuine comments.

Maybe those spammers are doing us all a favour after all.