I’ve just received this email today:

Dear Webmaster,

We’ve recently redesigned TheCelebrityCafe.com to include partner links. So far these new links have been trading about 400-800 visitors a day.

We’re looking for other partners to do trade trades with. If you have a site that gets significant traffic, we’d love to trade with you

I’ve omitted the publisher’s name, though I suppose anyone with the impetus could look it up. I’m thinking of writing him back, though. He really should know that link building today is far more sophisticated than stale reciprocal link schemes.

Dear Webmaster,

In case you hadn’t heard, link trades haven’t really been viable for about a decade now. It pains me that you are more interested in whether or not my site gets significant traffic, as opposed to whether or not it is relevant. Yes, I get decent enough traffic on my parenting blog, though probably nothing to write home about. The crux of the matter, however, is that I’ve never actually written about celebrities on my site in the six years of its existence, and I’d rather stab my eyeball with a fork than get into celebrity gossip. I’m far more interested in real people and real issues.

Furthermore, as much as I’d like to consider your link exchange request as spam, I suppose it’s possible that you got my name from one of the PR lists I’m on. If that’s the case, can you please tell me which one? I’d like to get off of it now.

Hugs and kisses,
Christina

Is The Celebrity Cafe Stuck in 1999? is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC

There is an update to this story posted on June 16, 2009.

I was scanning my referrer logs over the weekend for my mommy blog, Cutest Kid Ever. I came across an interesting URL “myseogal.com” in the report. So I clicked on it.

That was when I discovered that one of my blog posts was an example of someone’s “Blog Commenting Services.” Yep, I was comment spammed. The worst  part? Because of the post it was on, I’d gone through and  manually approved the offending comments from the Akismet spam queue because I thought they might be genuine. It was a post for the Ultimate Blog Party 2009, in which people just randomly drop by and comment on other people’s blogs in hopes of winning prizes. And maybe finding a new blog to subscribe to along the way.

I immediately deleted the comments that were now confirmed as spam. I updated my blog post with a message for people considering purchasing the “services” this spammer was providing. There are a few things I take issue with about the claims this spammer is making on her Web site:

• “So you don’t have to worry about any black hat listings tactics.” (Oh really? Comment spam is white hat? I think Google would disagree.)
• “We do not post on any blogs that have a no follow tag.” (Wrong! My comments section is no-followed. And it was being used as an example!)

Let’s remember… the only reason these comments showed up is because I manually approved them to begin with. Akismet identifies this crap as the spam that it is. It was my own stupidity that allowed a spammer to post links about personalized diaper cakes… If you look at the remaining comments on the post, there are a lot of “Just dropping by” messages, which were all in the spirit of the UBP. The difference in the spam was the optimized anchor text… even though no link juice was getting passed.

Blog spam is icky. I suppose at $14.99 for 10 backlinks, you can’t really expect quality anyways. But seriously? This woman chose the wrong blog to use as an example for her spamming tactics.I did consider emailing her to insist she remove the link to my site, but then I thought that educating the people who clicked on it served my purpose better. I wonder how long it will take  her to catch on. (Maybe looking at her referrer log and finding this post?)

Just say no to blog spam. And if you’re in the market for link building services, don’t be naive and think you’re going to get quality links for $15. The Google algorithms likely can identify comment spam. If the algorithms don’t, human reviewers can. Don’t get smacked by the Google hammer for buying bargain basement link building services. Seriously. Contribute to the quality of the Web. Be smarter with your money and your reputation. Spam sucks for everyone.

Blog Comment Spam – People Pay for This? is a post from: Christina Gleason - Founder of Phenomenal Content LLC