"Unlock Your Website's Hidden
Money Making Potential"
- by Chris Mole
Recently I noticed a comment on my blog from another Christchurch web design company. It was congratulating me on my “interesting and informative” post and saying how good it was to read such valuable content.
“That’s nice of them,” I thought. Until I looked at my visitor statistics and saw that this comment had actually been posted in India. Of course, I realised, the company has hired cheap labour to post comments on other people’s blogs, to help boost their website’s ranking in Google.
Sure enough, this particular web design company is number one in Google for the term ‘website designers Christchurch’. So their tactic works. And in one sense, good on them for taking advantage of a loophole in the system that Google has put in place.
Before my SEO friends get upset about what I’m writing here, let me say there are some genuine people trying to do SEO in an ethical way that genuinely makes a positive contribution to the Internet.
But more and more, SEO practices are filling the Internet with garbage. SEO companies are just trying to out-smart Google and it’s becoming nonsensical.
A common practice among SEO companies is to create fake accounts on blogs and forums so they can make comments and get backlinks to their clients’ sites.
Usually, they hire cheap labour in India or the Philippines to make these fake comments on blogs and forums. The blog commenters are trained on how to comment in a way that does not alert the suspicion of Google or the author of the blog.
This is borderline ethics, at best. I suppose you could argue it’s providing jobs for these fake blog commentators in third world countries. But on the other hand, it’s wasting the time of genuine blog owners who have to weed out these fake comments on their posts.
While Google is doing its best to fight against this kind of practice, it is very difficult to detect. What worries me is that the volume of fake comments is likely to get worse and worse, as more and more SEO companies hire cheap freelancers to do it.
I very rarely do SEO for clients these days. But I’ve recently taken on a couple of new SEO clients, just because I want to test my skills against others in the SEO industry. But I want to stick strictly to “white hat” and ethical methods.
Is it still possible to get a site ranked at the top of Google in a competitive field without restorting to “grey hat” or “black hat” tactics? I certainly hope so. My results with these two new clients will hopefully tell in a few months.
I am forever getting spam and crap comments on one of my blogs that are neither relevant or helpful and just say ‘nice post’ and link to some irrelevant website. I use blog commenting and forum posting as part of my SEO marketing but I have certain blogs (like this one) and forums that I follow and subscribe to. I try and find a few new ones each week. But posts left are relevant and well thought out. Sure I hope to get a backlink (as above) but also add some value and content to the blog or forum. This way I hope to build organic traffic from these comments, not just ‘link juice’.