Travel Blog Promotion Blog

If your blog is starting to get well known, you will get lots of comment spam. People just dropping links into your comments to their sites, without adding anything to the conversation. This takes up your time deleted and moderating the comments, makes you mad means you have to put hurdles in between you and those genuine commentors who will add value to your blog.

Most people just get mad.

I don´t, I do something different. I get links. I get more traffic. How? Well, first lets look at the types of comment spam and how it comes about.

1. Company or website has heard he needs backlings to his site to get traffic and links, and has paid some charlatan money to "get me some links!". They have probably gone for the cheapest option, one of those packages from digital point, and are currently waiting for a huge influx of traffic that will never come.
2. Some blackhatter has stuck up a junk MFA site (Made For Adsense) and uses automated tools to Spam the hell out comments, knowing that a small percentage of comments will get through spam filters and moderation and stick. Their crappy sites then fill up the search results, and everybody gets fed up with them.
3. Some webmaster who is working hard for their blog or site's SEO, but doesn´t really know what they are doing and spam your comments out of ignorance of the correct way to go about it.

The technique

There is not much you can do about spammer number 2, the black hatter, apart from put more barriers on your blog such as spam filters, captchas and the like, and change your comment form footprint.

However, with spammers 1 and 3, you can turn this to your advantage and gain a nice link. First, go and look at the site that has left a spam comment on your site. Many times, it is a legitimate, good looking, well established site in a related niche, and the owners are either unaware of the practices their seo agency are using or they are ignorant as to the correct way to do it. Then, we send them an email, such as this one:

Hello SITE MASTER,

I look after the site mysite.com, where you left a comment one of our blog articles, with a link to your site. I did not publish the comment, because it looks blatantly like SPAM, and would stick out like a sore thumb in the article.

I thought I would get in touch with you because your site does look nice, and I know how tough it can be promoting your website in these times. I don´t know if you are doing these comments in-house or paying some agency to do it for you, but this is not the way to get links from blog comments. May I ask how many of these comments got approved?

You commented on a post about xxxxxxx we had added on our website, and this was your comment:

INSERT THEIR COMMENT HERE

Let me know if you want some pointers on how to get proper links.

Thanks, your name your email your telephone your website

IMPORTANT!

You need to get the actual email of the site to send this to, as many times the email used to send the comment is managed by the people doing the spamming, not by the site owners.

Notice how the email is worded, I am not blaming them for spamming my blog, I am just alerting them to the fact that it has happened to help them out. I am also giving them a way out if it was them, by blaming the third party linkbuilding agency.

Hi Ben,

That would be an outside agency, sorry I'll bring it up with the owner. I just manage the actual site. the marketing isn't me.

Once again, sorry.

So I sent one back saying:

Hello xxx,

That´s ok, I thought I would just let you know as we have been burned by this sort of thing before. If you like, we can swap links, I can give you one in the body text of one of our posts, and you do the same?
Let me know,
Thanks.

And voila, a nice, juicy, related, in-body anchor texted link.

Conclusion

This is a great example of how lateral thinking and reaching out can turn a situation where you get frustrated and angry into one where you gain something of value, and make a new contact. So next time you get spam in your inbox, instead of huffing and puffing, you will get excited at a new link prospect! Has anyone else had success with techniques such as this?