Here’s a really old article from The Register:
It’s from 2005 but it’s still really relevant. A few points of note:
- ‘Sam’ is a link spammer. He spams websites and blogs with text to pump up the search engine rankings of sites pushing PPC.
- He’s not some 16 year old kid. He’s 32. That makes him 36 now.
- He writes automated scripts to comment spam en-mass.
- He uses open proxies to avoid detection
- Apparently results 8,9,10 have better conversion rates than 1,2,3
- He earns a 7 figure salary doing this. That’s a MILLION up!
- It’s completely legal. Link spam is different from email spam. It’s hard to argue the difference between a person using a computer to post a comment, and a person using a computer to use a computer to post a comment
Me and ‘Sam’ share some similarities. We’re both in the SEO business. We’re both hunting for links back to our sites to increase their SERP. We both comment on blog posts. Here’s where this guy and myself differ tho. Sure it is legal, but ethically what ‘Sam’ does sux. The fact that it is all automated means that he leaves the same or similar comments on all blog posts.
- I take the time to read the posts
- I manually make my comments and try to add value. The way the blogger actually wants by allowing comments in the post.
Sure you can make a million bucks doing what he does, but I think he crosses the line between good and evil. Don’t be a bloody spammer that everyone hates. Be a commentor that everyone loves to have on their blog.
Commenting on blogs is only helpful when you respect the rights of the blog owner. Simply saying I agree or “hey you make a good point keep up the good work is both offending and silly”. Also We try to post links that are not deceptive in any way shape or form.
Agree wholeheartedly. And, if you can not add value to the post by commenting, then don’t. I’m encouraging everyone who would like to learn more about value-add posting to visit my blog about DoFollow. dofollow blogger blogspot blog Matt
Commenting on blogs is only helpful when you respect the rights of the blog owner. Simply saying I agree or “hey you make a good point keep up the good work is both offending and silly”. Also We try to post links that are not deceptive in any way shape or form.
YES EVET S?TE
OK.
Hard to believe that it is even legal and yet someone is doing it for a 7 figure salary and makes more than anyone of us do.
Sooner or later (probably sooner) finding good backlinks is going to get much harder. Relevant links will play a much bigger part in the equation. Thanks for the great post.
wow.. he must be so freakin’ good in everything spamming.. image that 7 digit earning.. omg..
I’m with Sam, except for this one. And if you make a good content spinning in your script your comment will never be the same.
I have also received lots of spam comments on my blog but they were filled up with stupid links like pointing to their sites sitemap.xml or internal links but never saw an affiliate link, they were probably amateurs but this guy is smart as he makes 7 figure salary doing this…
Couldn’t agree more, to bot comments is unethical, i would think that blog admins wouldn’t approve the comments but i suppose there are alot of dormant blogs that don’t need it, low success rate but when it is automated i guess that makes them free.
Have come accross such comments before and it’s very irritating to say the least. Same comments everywhere and you’re like ‘hey, don’t they moderate the forums/blogs?’
They obviously don’t add any value to the post they’re commenting on.
Shouldn’t take long to actually read an article and write a decent comment. A decent comment should get a bit of traffic too and not just link juice. So, that would make it worth the time to read and write something worthwhile.