Most disturbing of all though are the SEO consultants and agencies who I have caught commenting on behalf of their clients, or as themselves with a link through to a client’s site. Some of them are totally dumb about it.

I now have a new comments policy in force though most of it is just a clearer interpretation of what has been in place for the last 3+ years.

Comment Policy Update: Nov 13th 2009 Keywords Etc

Looks like Friday 13th is a very bad day for comment spammers…

• No more keywords within anchor text in the comment fields
• No sig links under comments
• Highly relevant links in the body of a comment can contain anchor text such as the blog title but they will be judged on a case by case basis.
• Even after these changes, I still expect to delete 90% of human comments as the vast majority are just an attempt to get a link rather than adding real value to the conversation.
• SEO Consultants/Agencies – If I catch you commenting but linking to a client’s site, your online reputation, your firm’s and that of your client are being put at severe risk.

My full comment policy

I should really do an update about Disqus, but we can save that for another day – I still haven’t found enough time to fully clean up the mess they left my comments in, and some things will never be recovered.

This is part of my cleanup for when the new FTC rules come into effect at the beginning of December, though effectively the new US rules aren’t any stricter than rules currently in Europe & UK.

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I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

These are some of the reasons why:-

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that emails being sent from your own domain can be a significant liability
  

  It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
  I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect – the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues) – I just noticed on my Andy Beard Disqus profile that Scott Rafer responded to something important 2 months ago, and I didn’t see it.

Negative Side of Disqus

• The SEO of the site needs some major work – it is almost insulting that the link to Twitter on my Disqus profile is followed, yet the link to my blog isn’t. The anchor text from a conversation on Disqus back to a blog isn’t exactly ideal. This is how Google sees my Discus Profile
• Google is very bad at indexing content on Disqus – this is partially due to the Disqus SEO problems – certainly a conversation I took part in 4 days ago isn’t indexed.
• I have heard reports that managing spam can be an issue, though I haven’t tested it, I rarely see spam on highly popular blogs
• It isn’t suitable for private content – you would have to use alternative commenting on private posts if you are running your blog as a membership site. That is something that can be worked around.
• It is hard, maybe impossible to market to people after they have left a comment. With standard WordPress comments, after someone has left an email, you could present a page offering site membership, a one time offer, or an affiliate product – even suggest related content of interest.
• If you have lots of niche blogs, you will hardly want to include all of them on a single Disqus profile if you want to stay under the radar of your competitors. How would a blog network cope? Retain ownership? I can’t see B5 Network with a profile of 300+ blogs in Disqus and managing who can moderate comments.

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.

I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

Who knows, we might even get Twitter to remove nofollows too… eventually

Disclosure:- I am recommending Disqus even though part of my startup plans would have involved an SEO, product launch and membership friendly system with refined marketing funnel. If I ever get it off the ground, there are ways to migrate back from Disqus.

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We definitely do not tolerate any kind of SPAM at all

Unfortunately the evidence available to me at the time not just on my own blog but elsewhere, was in stark contrast.

Washington Post Spammed – great way to encourage press coverage

Any legitimate service, if they wanted to get press coverage from an international news publication, might issue a press release, and contact a newspaper through legitimate channels directly, or maybe through their public relations company.

Wide Circles seem to have a different approach that might gain them coverage, but for totally different reasons…

First of all we need to look at the Washington Post Discussion Guidelines

3. You understand and agree that the discussion forums are to be used only for non-commercial purposes. You may not solicit funds, promote commercial entities or otherwise engage in commercial activity in our discussion forums.

The first spam is on an article about parental filtering by OpenDNS

The second is on an April Fools Day security warning

Wide Circles Spamming Wikia

I am sure Jimmy Wales will love this example of “Viral Marketing” – for obvious reasons I don’t quite trust the content, so I am nofollowing the link, and didn’t give it any suitable anchor text.

More Wide Circles Spam Examples

Note: I am nofollowing links where they might not get cleared up.

Chris Dockery seems to have been spammed in just the same way I was.

Scott seems to have been spammed by Wide Circles, but he really should nofollow the link to them, both on his blog, and on the sites that syndicate his content, such as Gooruze.

Gobala seems to have had his forums spammed by Wide Circles.

The Blog Herald seems to be a very soft target for comment spam these days, just look at this post as an example.
But amongst the junk, is a very familiar comment
Just curious if anyone ever heard of WideCircles internet viral marketing service ? I was referred to it by another webmaster. Apparently they work by injecting viral messages into various forums, blogs, wiki’s, classifieds and so on. These messages then contain backlinks which help with SEO, as well attract lot of referral traffic. They bill around 0.40c per each post that’s been active for 5 days and say a single post can easily attract 100 or more hits a day, I am going to give them a try today and see how it goes. http://wide circles.com?imt=2

The BizInformer – spammed

Another example of Wide Circles forum spam over on Angelfire.

FastCompany isn’t immune to this kind of junk, though it is in the form of junk blog posts – again the wonderful claims

Here is an interesting comment on Andrew’s blog post, on companies looking to increase email marketing spend.

its ok.. but i have a different opinion as most of the people now days dont even try to open the mails that comes from unknown senders because simply it might be a spam so i guess the majority that opens such mails are the new users of the internet and i agree that they are growing but they are not the majority of the internet users.

——–
franko.

Put The Message Where It Matters! WideCircles aka Wide Circles represents relevant, distributed, highly targeted and efficient internet word of mouth marketing using entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion using social network mediums such as blogs, forums, wikis and so on.
http://wide circles.com

My personal interpretation: The comment intent is to drop the link, and possibly to suggest that their “viral marketing” is a better alternative. Just because there might be some relevance to the comment doesn’t make this legitimate as a form of marketing.
This is a borderline case, but I would have spammed it.

WebProWorld Spammed

This example is actually very sad

WebProNews like many forums allow you to use a sig which has followed links – all you have to do is take part in the conversation, and you can get a link back to whatever sites you like, though probably best to link back to sites you own.

We have a thread asking for an alternative video hosting service for use with Wordpress

The first comment was totally off topic, just spamming a link

The second message is highly generic with the link in the sig – but the person doing it doesn’t even know how to format an HTML hyperlink correctly. As well as running male beauty contests, Jaan just happens to be a moderator at WebProWorld. I am sure he will be interested.

Wide Circles Spamming Sphinn

This last example is a little more personal, because it involves a blog post that is about me, and calls into question my initial evaluation of Wide Circles.

I would like to state for the record I have no objection to open dialogue, and even criticism, but I much prefer criticism from real people rather than sock puppets.

There is a thread on Sphinn that has appeared and as others have noted, it is a little on the dubious side… to say the least.

Despite the extremely dubious comments, I actually hope the Sphinn moderators leave this example of Wide Circles comment spam online, though they should probably prevent the sock puppet accounts from voting on any more stories. IP addresses might not be much value, as some people working with Wide Circles are known to use proxys.

Do you also see how they are down voting comments made by legitimate members of the Sphinn community?

A quick shout out to thank Jonathan and Bob – I am not sure who Sleuth1 is.

The is a little history behind Bob’s comment, I once wrote a highly negative review of one of his services. I didn’t know him at the time, and it wasn’t actually obvious that he was involved. It would have taken a little detective work, and I found out quite by chance many months later when doing some other research.
So having written negative things about him, he now includes me on his blogroll.

Bob Massa also offers SEO linkbuilding and content generation services. Even though I have corresponded with Bob a little now by email, if his guys were blatantly spamming in the same way as Wide Circles, I would probably write a similar post to this one.

The Sphinn Sock Puppets

Just for the record…

JustinLang1

Jacklassape

Nancyd91

Jdanston

The Sphinn Story Itself

First of all, Jackie Nerito is a pseudonym

It was in some way a response to my coverage of Widecircles, but they didn’t deem it worthy of a link, even if nofollowed, or even provide a reference that could be copy / pasted.

I am not going to link through to the post, because they could just flag me as spam in Akisment, and I wouldn’t link to them with a followed link anyway, as I have no trust in the content.

http://circle world.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/andy-beard-on-wide-circles-aka-widecircles/

I have added a space in the URL – I wouldn’t want the post being linked to automatically by splogs.

This is actually one of two highly questionable blogs on the topic of Wide Circles, here is the other one

http://widecircles world.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/wide-circles-releases-new-version-of-the-system/

There is a high chance that they are both on the same WP.com account.

The points raised in the post?

• I did mention other services, such as forum posting and wiki spam – I didn’t concentrate on them – based upon the comments I have seen, if they have moved into also providing a blog post service, I really would stay far far away from it, unless your target market wouldn’t know the difference between literate and illiterate English. That is based upon what I have seen. I spent a fair amount of time on the first post, and again on this one – I also left comments with opposing views, even though they were anonymous with fake email address, and left using a proxy
• “Comments when done properly and by trained staff are not dangerous, they can increase your rank, help you with seo and allow you receive lot of referral traffic” – just look at the junk examples that Wide Circles have excreted over the internet to promote their own brand
• Referral traffic – the only referral traffic woulld be from people wondering “Where the hell did this junk comment come from” – once the domain starts being trashed in spam filters, and being talked about in negative light, the comment spam just increases the damage already caused.
• Comment spam as paid links – it appears the writer doesn’t pay careful attention to the Google webmaster groups, for instance this thread on penalties for one site, and in particular this comment by John Mu
  

  Similar to how you have removed spammy links in your own forum, you
  may want to consider what you can do to help clean up similar links on
  other people’s sites. Blogs and newspaper sites such as
  http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com sometimes receive short
  comments such as “dont agree”, apparently only for a link back to a
  site. These comments often use keywords from that site instead of a
  user name, perhaps “tree bench” for a furniture site or “sexy shoes”
  for a footwear site. If this kind of behavior might have taken place
  for your site, you may want to work on rectifying it and include some
  information on it in your reconsideration request. Given your
  situation, the person considering your reconsideration request might
  be curious about links like that, so the more you can explain about
  that, that may help as well.

  John

  Thus Google can look on spam comments as a factor for ranking penalties.

• Legitimate Paid Comments – I get the instinct impression that the author was working from a print out of my previous Wide Circles post, because the paragraph regarding legitimate paid comments contained a clear, obvious link to a previous blog post on paid blog comments. I have just included a link to it again.
  This would include for instance Tamar, who is paid to write articles for Mashable, Lifehacker and is the Associate Editor of Search Engine Round Table. If I link to an article she wrote on Mashable, and she came to my blog and left a comment, in many ways she is being paid to write that comment.
  If you were using an outsourcing company such as Bob’s to create your blog content, then in theory it would be legitimate for the person writing content for your blog to also respond to comments, but as themselves or their personal pseudonym, not as “you”.

As for being a “SEO expert” I let other people judge – I don’t sell any kind of consulting or work for any 3rd party clients.

I have a screenshot of the post itself for my records, but this page is already quite heavy with graphics, so in the interests of page load time, here is that broken URL again
http://circle world.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/andy-beard-on-wide-circles-aka-widecircles/

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As is well known I am not a huge fan of collective intelligence as the sole arbiter of whether a comment is “spam or ham”, and long term I am most likely to switch back to Spam Karma, possibly using Typepad Antispam as an additional filter.

I am also going to grab the code from Igor so I can test Typepad Antispam in conjunction with his Project Honeypot though I think that too is best served as a Spam Karma filter/plugin with probably a high threshold.

Typepad Antispam was quite easy to set up

Grab A Typepad Key

If you have been blogging for a while and commenting on Typepad blogs, you most likely already have a Typekey account, you might just have forgotten the password ;)

Install Plugin And Add Key

Upload and activate the plugin, then add your key.

Auntie… Help!

The biggest immediate problem is that Akismet Auntie Spam doesn’t work with Typepad Spam. Hopefully that is something we can persuade Engtech to fix :)

The second problem is that I have already had at least one clearly automated porn spam hit me for moderation. With Spam Karma, automated spam doesn’t have a chance. It wasn’t a borderline case, it had tons of porn keywords and links in it.

I have used the dedicated plugin they provide, but apparently the guys at Techcrunch just modified 3 lines in Akismet to get it to work. That would immediately solve the Auntie Spam issue, and is something I will look into on a temporary basis.

It also suggests that a Spam Karma plugin will be a trivial task to get working.

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It runs something like this (though I haven’t signed up to one to get exact details)

• You sign up to the mentorship program
• One of the tasks is backlink building from Dofollow blogs
• The new internet marketer runs around leaving comments on Dofollow blogs, but uses backlinks to the blog or salespage of the internet marketing guru
• After dropping a certain number of backlinks, the new internet marketer qualifies for a bonus

The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions within the comments.

I Regard This As Comment Spam

My normal reaction is to hit the spam button, which will eventually prevent me seeing future comments by the people on the mentorship program, even if they eventually start leaving comments on their own behalf.

I haven’t got time to edit links even if the comments contain some legitimate content.

The mentorship program is effectively burning legitimate link sources for the people taking the “course”.

Great job..

In addition, the chances of me giving an editorial link at some time to the “guru” or promoting one of their products as a JV partner are hugely reduced.

Legitimate Employees And VAs

As a blogger, I want to know who is leaving a comment.

I don’t mind anchor text used in comments, if my blog passes juice it might as well pass anchor text as well, but anyone following the link needs to be able to determine who left the comment.
This is a lot easier with personal blogs, or blogs run by a single person.

If my friend Michel Fortin left a comment with the anchor text “Copywriting” I am not going to worry about it. You go to his blog, it is clearly his blog.

Joy Gustilo works for Russell Brunson – that is a link to her profile on DotComSecrets and Joy often uses “Internet Marketing Joy” as anchor text – that is great, I know it is Joy and not Russell leaving the comment.

I have a few other readers also competing for that SERP so I should probably balance that out a little

If Courtney used “Internet Marketing” when leaving a comment, I wouldn’t have a problem – his blog is personal

You have probably seen Dwain Jeworski on various social networks. He used to work with Rich Schefren, and now is with the Internet Marketing Center as their Affiliate Manager. If Dwain used “Internet Marketing Dwain as anchor text in a comment, that would be appropriate. Just using Internet Marketing wouldn’t, because it would be impossible to tell if the comment was written by Dwain or maybe Derek Gehl.
The IMC have over 100 employees – can you imagine if a few of them all had a conversation in my comment area each signing their name as Internet Marketing?

One thing I would love to see on the IMC site is staff profiles which could be used as landing pages for social media link building. It would be possible to funnel juice from those landing pages through to pages where it is needed, which is much harder to do with links directly to a home page.

That is something Joy should think about with her comment links as well.

I am not quite sure how I would deal with comments from Jim Boykin if he was using anchor text such as “Internet Marketing” – I think anchor text would be appropriate for a link to his blog, as the blog is clearly his, whereas a link to the company site I would want some kind of identifier in the anchor text as to who left the comment.
Then again Jim’s ninja’s would probably use some kind of landing page method.

Of course Josh could link through to his Internet Marketing Blog as much as he likes. Again it is his personal blog. (some more on Josh’s blog coming up soon)

So ends my “SERPs Neutral” overview of acceptable linking practice, though there is a good chance I have missed a few people out from my readers.

I am Not Going To Name & Shame

At least not yet…

I left a comment on one blog regarding this practice, and it seemed to stop, at least on my blog, but the comment didn’t appear on the blog, and was not acknowledged directly.

Another “guru” when contacted about this last year offered to chat about it, but didn’t apologise.

I have noticed it starting again over the last few weeks, not just spammy linkbuilders, but quite obviously new internet marketers under some kind of mentorship.

Come on guys, behave… I’m serious

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