December 12, 2008 by
ryan
"nice post!!thanks for the info..that's great and cool"
-Random Spammer
As
a web developer / someone who has a blog, I understand dealing with
spam is one of the necessary evils of having a comments enabled on my
site. For the most part, my site has remained far enough under the
radar that most spammers do not waste their time. More recently,
however, there has been a gradual influx of comment spam with a title
something along the lines of "[Company Name] SEO Test." There is worse
spam for sure but it was definitely annoying.
A quick Google
search pointed me to a Web Development and Search Engine Optimization
company hosting an SEO competition. I checked the rules and sure enough,
there was a rule stating that only Ethical SEO Techniques would be
permitted. Quickly, I emailed the organization one of the comments
(with url, ip, email, etc) exepecting the offending parties would be
removed from the competition, eliminating additional garbage comments.
I was shocked to receive their reply.
Unfortunately
this is not against the rules of the competition – I would encourage
you to remove the spamming links for your website to discourage this
behaviour but as I said I can’t actually penalise this person
for making posts on other peoples websites.
Sorry about the spam.
Gaming the System
In
my opinion, Search Engine Optimization should be about perfecting a
website and the website's content; not tricking google into thinking
more people find your content useful than actuality.
Optimizing tags
and titles is one thing but gaming the system to garner search ranking is wrong
and is detrimental to the web as a whole. Just because commenting is
legal and allowable does not make it ethical. Unfortunately, this
practice will continue to exist as long as it gets results and
organizations act as enablers to those who would use these tactics for
financial gain (not to mention increased search engine ranking for the
enabling organizations).
Link Spam is Digital Graffiti
Imagine
for a second if companies condoned this practice outside of the Web --
what if McDonalds or Nike paid for their logos to be spray painted on
other's property? To make matters worse what if after receiving
numerous complaints they held a press conference and said "soap and
water removes the paint" or "just hire some guards and the problem will
go away."? I think it's safe to assume that practice would not be
received so kindly (h/t
Matt Braun on the graffiti analogy)!
Fortunately a link is not as hard to remove as paint but the concept is
similar.
Solutions anyone?
Social networks such as
Digg,
DotNetKicks and
DZone have always been plagued by those who would
try to circumvent the rules for personal gain. Where honeypots and
captcha systems would traditionally help against
bots, an increasing number of spammers seem to be actual people. The
administrators of these social networks are constantly coming up with
more sophisticated ways to combat spam but what should small blogs and
websites do?
Currently,
there are a number of methodologies for preventing blog spam that work
with varying degrees of effectiveness but none are ideal. Obviously,
you can moderate comments -- this works okay but is painful if you are
getting a lot of spam or a lot of comments. Also, make sure your
comment links have a rel="nofollow" attribute (h/t
Simone Chiaretta). Google
does not take nofollow links into account when calculating page rank.
Although this does not reward the spammer, it does not prevent spam.
What I would like to see is a centralized comment system like Disqus or
IntenseDebate that lets a user login with OpenID, Google Friend
Connect, Microsoft LiveID, Facebook Connect (whichever the user wants).
There would be a standard vote up / down vote for every comment a user
makes where the overall votes across all sites would determine the
users rating. Casting a down vote would remove a minimal amount of
points from the voter to prevent someone from going on a down vote
rampage (exactly how
StackOverflow works). Site owners could set
restrictions that would prevent users with a rating less than a
specified number from posting on their site. This may be idealistic and
introduce a new realm of privacy concerns but if done properly, I think it
would help eliminate a great deal of spam.
Wrapping things up
Although there are many less-than ethical tactics to increasing a
site's ranking, site structure and site content are the best methods of
SEO. I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and any suggestions you
have in eliminating link spam.
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