Here is the official proclamation of best practice in the eyes of Google

I should note that Google classifies their post as “Webmaster Level: Beginner”

I am classifying this post as “Webmaster Level: Here We Go Again”

1. It is effectively a case of “Do As We Say, Not As We Do”

You see, every time I leave a comment on the Google Webmaster blog (something I avoid doing too often), I get pummelled with email spam.

(edit: added a smaller image without thumbnail that doesn’t use WordPress gallery)

If you are using any kind of subscribe to comments feature it can absolutely kill your email delivery rates if you let through spam like this, especially if you don’t have effective blacklist control and a feedback loop.
Somehow Gmail always lets through spam like this, but blocks legitimate comment threads I have subscribed to. True I have subscribed to the comments on the Google Webmaster blog because I want to read legitimate comments, but I don’t want the comment spam in my email box.

Maile Ohye did eventually close the comments on the original blog post, but they almost certainly need better controls.

2. What can I do to avoid spam on my site?

Whilst Google warn about cleaning up bad comments you might have left elsewhere, they don’t give a hint that linking to dodgy places, maybe even using nofollow links could have a negative impact on search results.

Maybe they should have taken this opportunity to warn webmasters about Page Level Penalties for Comment Spam

At least they didn’t pimp Recaptcha which they bought not too long ago

Don’t misunderstand this, I think it is a terrible user experience to have to wade through poor quality comments trying to pick out the gems – one of the reasons I take a harsh line on comment spam is because I respect my readers. I want my comments area to be worth reading.

3. What Happened to Google’s Old Legal Slant?

At the height of the paid links crackdown 2 years ago, there were lots of warnings about the potential problems with disclosure and paid links – in August 2007 I even suggested that the FTC should take a look at Matt’s blog shilling for Google…
Matt now has a disclosure policy, but he doesn’t practice what he preached for so long, very clear in post disclosure which is probably what the FTC would hope for.
Here is an example, his most recent post on Google OS does not state he is an employee of Google within the content.

Shill comments from a legal perspective are probably just as bad as shill blog posts

But I am not a lawyer, and Google employs 100s

In many ways I support the actions Lord Matt has taken on recent comment spam, contacting the supposed company who left comment spam, Rapunzel Rapunzel to see if they were actually aware of the dangerous SEO strategy employed by their contracted SEO company, or maybe a marketing employee.

BTW – Jim Edwards interviewed Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy covering topics such as FTC, Disclosure, Blogging, Testimonials etc
Whilst there are tons of kits on sale prepared by laywers, I would strongly recommend this as a first base of call on anything to do with the new FTC advisory on disclosure.

4. Similarities Between Paid Links & Comment Spam

Almost none other than their effect on Google rankings and the vehemence with which service providers defend them, such as when I changed my comments policy, or wrote about Wide Circles and Wide Circles Comment Spam.

• Comment spam generally leads to poor quality sites – paid links generally lead to a site with commercial focus, but it would be rare for someone to invest lots of money in paid links trying to rank a malware site.
• Paid links are generally vetted – comment spam generally isn’t
• Paid links from a human perspective historically were often more disclosed than comment spam

What will possibly become the biggest similarity going forward is the way Google punish site owners who host comment spam, just like they punish people who host paid links. They can’t easily punish sites that are gaining links in this way if they have an otherwise normal link profile, because ultimately the comments could just be a competitor trying their hand at “Google Whacking”.

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/

The best way to guest post on my blog is just to write a great comment.

Wide Circles ( http://www.widecircles.com/ nofollowed link for good reason) have a number of offerings.

• Forum sigs – this for me is a grey area, I know many forums that allow affiliate links in sigs, and there is a market for forum sig links on some of the large webmaster forums, though they don’t offer much traffic or juice benefit. I suppose they are good for sites that can’t get better links.
• Comment spam – this takes the form of a social signature (again a nofollow link), leaving a link underneath a name when leaving a comment. They do stress that commenters
  should check the rules for each site before spamming them.
• Wiki spam – they add links to pages or create new pages – some SEOs are going to thing “great – cool service”

They also list general comments, guestbooks, polls and classified ads

You will find blogs that will allow a link to be left under a name, especially when a link field is not provided. The problem is that these fields are specifically intended to link back to a person’s own site and where they are not present a link drop as part of a sig though accepted, would still be expected to link to something related to the person leaving the comment.

This helps other readers find out who they are, what might influence their perspective, and might even be looked on as a method of indirect disclosure, as long as there is an easy to find disclosure statement for anyone clicking through.

Evidence For The Prosecution

Exhibit A

This comment was posted on a post about Blogrush

wide circles or widecircles is really great service http://www.wide circles.ca

Exhibit B

To add insult to injury, this was posted on my post slamming the practice of comment spam as part of internet marketing mentoring programs

wide circles or widecircles is really a great service indeed http://www.wide circles.com

Note: I added a space in the urls above to ensure even on splogs they get no link credit

Both comments came from the same person using the following IP
(IP: 68.145.66.81 , S0106001839263935.cg.shawcable.net)

Maybe I should contact Shaw Communications Inc. about abuse, though I am not sure ISPs look on comment spam as seriously as email spam. It did get sent to my email address however, and if I was using subscribe to comments, it might have gone to 50+ email subscribers.

The legal issues around blog comment spam can start getting nasty.

They also make fun claims such as

This single signature with the link can attract many users who are intrested to find out about the service or product being offered and it will also help with search engine optimization strategy and rankings, since every comment made by our publisher is esentially different.

…complete with their spelling errors.

Anyone using the comment spam service is lining themselves up for a reputation management disaster, because just like I am making this blog post about Wide Circles, other people don’t like being spammed either.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I headed off a rather delicate situation with the mentoring programs comment spam. Shawn, one of my regular readers and a SEO in Scotland was getting sick of comment spam coming from these so called “internships” and was quite prepared to go on the warpath..

I advised caution, because other than the mentorship programs, the people involved are actually quite legitimate marketers, and contacted a mutual friend to see if things could be handled more diplomatically. The jury is out on that still.

Another thing to be cautious about, these are paid links, even the forum links, and Google are always on the lookout for link buying, especially on obvious web destinations such as popular webmaster forums.

This isn’t the only incident today. I had another one where I caught a SEO linkbuilding for a client – I just contacted his boss – link building through comments is extremely risky both for the client and service provider.

It is especially risky on SEO blogs, and many dofollow bloggers are very well aware of all the tricks – they know their regular readers.

I have argued in the past that paid blog comments can be legitimate, but it is under very specific circumstances, that Wide Circles just does not meet.