Penalised for linking to bad neighbourhoods - watch your blog comments.

Posted by stuart as , , , , , , , ,

I have quite a few grey/black hat SEO blogs in my reader (and if you’re even vaguely serious about SEO, you should too). There’s lot’s of great stuff in some of these blogs, which can be applied to white hat sites as well as the shadier side of SEO.

A lot of the stuff you can learn on these blogs helps you to take a defensive position on your own sites. Knowing how a spammer finds dofollow blogs to spam, for example, helps you to keep these spammers at bay.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about link building to new sites over the last couple of weeks. One well known blackhat technique to build links is to find old/abandoned blogs, and drop your links there. It’s a fact that the ease of setting up a blog using a hosted service such as blogger or wordpress, or even the one-touch installation of blogging platforms such as Wordpress through Fantastico means that there are literally millions, if not tens of millions of abandoned blogs sitting there waiting to have links dropped on them.

Now any white, black, or any shade of grey hat SEO knows that relevant, quality links are the most valuable. But there’s also a lot to be said for getting a shitload of crappy links as well.

A well crafted Google search will return a crapload of blogs which haven’t been updated in some time, ripe for the dropping of comment spam.

This is all well and good, and not really my cup of tea, so why am I writing about it?

Because I have a crapload of abandoned blogs and forums on domains I own, that’s why.

“So what?” you might say, “let the spammers have their fun”. Which is great, except that none of those domains have private registrations, and some of them still have my AdSense code on them.

I’ve written a couple of times about the fact that sooner or later, the search engines are going to start automatically nofollowing blog comments, regardless of the href tag containing rel=”nofollow” or not.  There’s not really any argument I can come up with to justify the thought that a link from a blog comment is a “vote” for the site that it points to from the owner of the site upon which the comment is dropped.

So if the search engines are still giving some credence to links from blog comments and forum posts, they must also be applying their quality rules to them as well, and we all know that Google, especially, takes notice of where you point links to from your sites.

In my case, I’m pointing a shitload of dofollow links to really dodgy neighbourhoods: poker sites, viagra and cialis sites, and more than likely some pretty shady porn sites. All nicely presented to google with my AdSense ID and my public whois information, which is shared across most of my other sites.

Time for a bit of a tidy up, I think.