Pissing in Public Can Really Suck

I find myself amazed at the  fascination, okay, the obsession with comment spamming for links.  There’s a few free tools and search engines for finding blogs whose comments haven’t been nofollowed to keep all the little kiddies from pissing all over their blog.

There is free software available  that is supposed to help you find blogs that aren’t “nofollowed” so that you can go around town spamming your links with the hopes that they might actually be counted for something by the search engines.

Oh, yeah – I forgot, you’re supposed to get a ton of free targeted traffic this way as well.

While this method may help you obtain those coveted first page results for some absolutely useless long tail keyword phrase that nobody but you are proud of (free animal clubs comes to mind for some reason), I wouldn’t use this method to get these cheap links for any site that you’re serious about.

Why not?

Well, for starters Google has begun hinting that this method can have a down side. Any time Google starts with their subtle suggestions that certain methods employed by Search Engine Optimists can affect your rankings, it’s time to pay attention.

Last November, Google began eluding to the fact that going around pissing on everyone else’s blog can have a downside:

Hard facts about comment spam

Some webmasters abuse other sites by exploiting their comment fields, posting tons of links that point back to the poster’s site in an attempt to boost their site’s ranking. Others might tweak this approach a bit by posting a generic comment (like “Nice site!”) with a commercial user name linking to their site.

Why is it bad?

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people’s hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one’s site in the long run.

The post continues on to explain that comment spamming is not the way to go when trying to improve your site’s visibility, and how to combat comment spam or clean up a blog that smells of urine like some back alley on skid row. What’s really interesting is the closing paragraph explaining how to go about undoing the comment spam:

If I spammed comment fields of third party sites, what should I do?

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you’ve cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

If comment spamming could not hurt your site, why would Google suggest that you try to remove the “spammy links you created” and file a reconsideration request? Something to think about?