Don't Compliment My Blog!

I constantly get saccharine, overblown spam comments about my wonderful blog posts. The problem of course is that these "comments" have nothing to do with the content of the post and always contain a link to some commentator's personal business or blog. They are pernicious and I uniformly delete them. If you happen to post online, you should be aware of this undercurrent of unsolicited and sometimes dangerous practice of sending out blanket, generic comments with a link. In most cases, the existence of the link will not be obvious.

In the worst case scenario, these links could well be phishing expeditions with the links designed to download malware to your computer. But even if the links are genuine, the purpose for sending the links is to increase the visibility of a website. One of criteria for measuring the reach of a website is the number of "links" it generates. These spammers have not read your blog post nor do they care about your content, they are merely trying to increase the links to their own websites to try to force the websites up in the search engine scanning process. These tactics, along with a long list of others, are collectively referred to as "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO.

There are thousands of websites online that are directed at SEO with tag lines such as the following;

• simple
• do it yourself
• beginner's
• starter
• step-by-step
• online marketing

There is a publication from Google entitled, "Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide." On page 22 of Google's Guide it explains what this problem entails. If you are interested in preventing commentator's spam and avoiding earning a reputation as a spammy website, you should review this page of the Guide. The simple solution is the one I have chosen and that is to moderate all comments. So, if you want to compliment my blog, be very specific and don't copy portions of a post or use effusive language. If you do, I will simply delete your comment.