Blog Commenting and the Spammers
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 19:48Don?t you just hate the way the bad guys can take a perfectly legitimate way to do something, carry it all the way to its farthest extreme and blow it for everyone else?
The perfect example is blog commenting. Commenting on blogs is a great way to create meaningful dialogs. If done correctly, it?s also a good way to drive traffic to your website. It used to be a good way to build backlinks, too.
The backlink advantage is still there if you search out the minority of bloggers who?ve intentionally decided to join the ?do follow? movement, but overall pickings are slim. Most blogs are ?no follow? these days.
And it?s because the comment spammers went crazy, bombarding innocent blogs with thousand-link comment touting the virtues of Viagra and describing certain activities that probably shouldn?t be described (if you know what I mean).
You can still drive traffic with blog comments, but the whole scene has gone downhill thanks to comment spam. We can only hope that the burgeoning ?do follow? movement gains momentum and that spam defenses like Akismet continue to improve. It may not be too late to make it back to something approximating ?the good old days?.
