Why Comment Spam Happens on Nofollow Blogs

I just found a great explanation of why low-quality link builders persist at spamming blogs with useless comments. The brief explanation was actually part of a longer comment on another blog post complaining about Black-hat SEO techniques. Although not confirmed by my personal experience, the explanation makes a lot of sense.

By way of explanation, the nofollow attribute in a link keeps Google from counting that link as a backlink to your website. Almost all blogs automatically attribute links in their comments with nofollow. Since gaining links on other Websites to yours (link building) is done for the purpose of having Google count those links as backlinks, nofollow blog comment links seem useless for SEO.

As the comment cited above pointed out, these cheap links ARE useless for SEO. Their real purpose is to confuse competitors trying to determine where the real link juice is coming from. Another benefit of this spammy link building is that it makes the link profile of the website look more natural to Google. A steady stream of garbage links smooths out the linking profile.

Beware though. Small players could really get burned if they try using this technique themselves. Without the real strong links that the big guys have, all these garbage links can do a lot of harm and no good.

Blog comments, link exchanges and low quality link directories are the mainstays of offshore, cheap link building operations. If you've ever used Yahoo Site Explorer to take a peek at a high ranking websites inlinks, you know how much garbage there is to sift through to find a good link. If you have a blog, you know the volume of obvious spam comments that are submitted daily.

So, although spam blog comments are a major annoyance to bloggers, and an enigma to SEOs, they will persist as long as they are useful to the big players in keeping their link building process a secret.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Tool

Ready for the coolest new SEO tool that you've never heard of? Try out Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (formerly Microsoft AdCenter Add-in for Excel). Like all the great free SEO tools, it has been developed to aid in the use of a search engine's PPC program. It is still very valuable for organic SEO.

Here's what you need:

• Microsoft Excel 2007
• A MS AdCenter account

Just install it (with Excel closed), start up Excel and you'll see a new tab with a ton of functions that will make any SEO geek smile. But, I won't spoil the surprise. Download it now and get started!

Microsoft adCenter

I just signed up for a Microsoft adCenter account for the first time. A web hosting company that I use was offering free trial vouchers, so I took advantage. I've used Google Adwords for Pay Per Click (PPC)advertising before, but at that time I was looking at the big head (a few competitive key phrases) rather than the long tail (many less competetive key phrases), so the ROI just wasn't there for me. Now that I am less lame at SEO, I decided to give PPC another try. It was free after all. Well, $5 for the set-up.

The account setup is very similar to Google AdWords. If you haven't done either yet, and are interested in seach engine ranking for your Website, you really need to look at the keyword tools in the AdWords, or Microsoft adCenter accounts (does the way marketing people mix upper and lower case letters in their product names REALLY bug you too?).

I haven't received editorial approval, so I don't yet know how Microsoft adCenter will work out for me. I am writing this now because one of my keyphrases in the campaign is "fremont web design" and in looking at the lay of the land on MSN after setting up the PPC account, I noticed that this blog was number one for that keyphrase already. So maybe I had better start writing something here.