How spam comments might help your link building
I know, guys, this title is misleading, but before you start yelling “Black hat! Black hat!”, give me some trust and read a few more of this post.
The idea for it has come from some comments to my Guide to Hacked Link Building: if you haven’t read it maybe you’ll want to check it, anyaway I was basically tweaking broken link building strategy, by suggesting to find hacked abandoned websites and contact those ones still linking to them to kindly advice changing the links to other resources (guess by whom?).
That post has received some great endorsements, but also a couple of comments that have led me to this new one.
One was from Chris Dyson:
Another one is the following:
There are some questions of ethics in this approach…..The First Guide to Hacked Link Building: via @zen2seo en.posizionamentozen.com/blog/the-first…
— Michael Cropper (@MickCropper) September 13, 2012
This last comment, combined that things have really gone like Chris was saying, has made me think that probably I haven’t been capable enough to transmit the main message of the post: the idea behind broken link building has lots of variations, as a link building authority like Jon Cooper has pointed out:
So let’s come back to the title of this post: How spam comments might help your link building. If you’ve followed my reasoning, you already know what I’m going to tell you now. Just check spam comments to your blog.
Pick out a phrase, search it on Google in quotes and take note of blogs that have allowed spam comments on their posts. Are they worthy to be linked to? To me, not so much.
Would you feel guilty to ask someone to divert those links to a better maintained site? I wouldn’t. I mean, if one doesn’t care of having p0rn comments on their blog, maybe they don’t deserve a so great link love.
To conclude, use the approach you feel more comfortable with, but mainly go after this idea: linking out to bad resources is something no one likes. If you help webmasters to change those links you don’t only get some link juice for you, but also allow a better experience to people who will click on those links.
If you can think of any valid reason why a link should be changed, then maybe you can make that link yours.
11 COMMENTS
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One question: If a site accepts blog spam comments, do you really want to approach them for a link?
Hi David,
thanks for leaving a comment. I don’t suggest getting link from blogs that accept spam comments, but to look at who links to them and suggest changing that link to your resources (it’s like broken link building, but now the link you are going for is not broken but pointing to a page with spam comments on it…)
If sharing this posts hurts my image, I’ll know…
I’d be interested to know how the success rate compares to broken linkbuilding (but I guess I’ll get those figures myself). Thanks for sharing the idea, great variation. Some of these comments are spammed so hard without being aimed you can actually create a pretty decent list for a niche by using each sentence as your seed. Thanks again.
Hi Oliver,
I hope it won’t!
I haven’t tested this strategy widely, I often miss the time to put into practice all my ideas, but I guess it could work well if you do backlink analysis for pages with clearly spam comments (vi4gra or similar stuff).
Good luck if you’ll try!
Ah that makes more sense, so essentially link hijacking then? Sorry for all the questions, I’m just trying to understand 🙂 Maybe I’ll provide an example you can pick apart:
Jen from paydayloanscash.com is a notorious comment spammer, that also left a comment on your your blog. You take the text of the comment (assuming that this spam comment is literally duplicated across the web), do an exact Google search and find out where else Jen has spammed using the same comment.
*Here’s where I get confused.
a) Do you run a backlink report on the blogs / websites where links to paydayloanscash.com appears, and try to convince them that Jen is a spammer and they shouldn’t be linking to them?
b) Do you just inform those blogs / websites that they have in fact been spammed, and as an act of good faith, you establish a relationship with them in order to build your own links on their sites?
c) We’ve eliminated the fact that you don’t want to use these blogs as your own comment spam link targets – no need to pursue that then 🙂
However this confuses me too: “Would you feel guilty to ask someone to divert those links to a better maintained site? ”
So, are you saying that they should change the comment spam links (also assuming they are largely nofollow’d ) to better links (your site) and keep the comment?
Thanks!
Sorry, David, in this post I just add something to my previous Hacked Link Building guide, so probably it can be a little confusing without having read the other one. What I mean is: let’s say I find that website A allowed Jen’s comment to be published. I may look to sites B,C,D,E that link to A and inform them that they are linking to a page that hosts those Jen’s spam comments (p0rn instead of loans would work better). Maybe B,C,D,E would like to remove their links to website A, that’s filled with p0rn comments, and point their links to another site that takes care of deleting bad comments (your site).
Basically you’re “stealing” A website links, but if A lets p0rn comments appear on its pages I think it’s probably abandoned and it doesn’t deserve to be linked to. I hope to have been more precise now…
Anyway, establishing a relation with spammed website when spam is not evident is another good idea I was thinking of, thanks!
Ahhhh okay. I like that idea, so essentially telling websites B,C,D and E that they are potentially linking to “bad neighbourhoods” (because they allow spam) and hijacking website A’s links.
As long as you can fulfill the relevant content of website A’s original link, then yeah it could work.
Good luck!
[…] behind broken link building and this has gone on to form more link building tactics such as helping bloggers with spam problems or who may have had their websites […]
[…] linking to a site that distributes malware or redirects to a viagra ecommerce. This led me also to a next twist suggesting to target sites that are full of spam comments. They can be targets as well, since people wouldn’t like to know they’re linking to a page that […]
Hi!
Good article and widely I share your opinion. But I, personally, would only post on blogs which are sharing my topic and are at least PR1.
Earlier I tried to blackhat-seo up my website and it worked, for a month or two and after that I got google penalties. Not so fine 😉
BR
Toni