I haven’t written much the last week – mostly because I’ve been swamped. So it was very surprising to get about 200 new blog comments overnight.

Highly irregular in fact, as I have not received 200 “real” comments total since I started two months ago!

Overnight, I received about 3 comments for every blog entry published to date. Amazingly, all 3 were the same, for every single entry.

“Great Post. You should read this < link to online realtor site >”

“Very interesting, have you checked out < link to gambling site >”

and;

“Wonderful insight. Let me know what you think of mine < adult site >”

No, I’m not going to take the bait on the wording of that last one.

People really are wasting their money getting people to spam blogs to obtain inbound links. The spam artists are making a killing here, and ruining a few businesses quickly.

Google, MSN, Yahoo, and the others also have taken measures to diminish the value of blog spam. They seek it out. In particular, they discount comments links, and ask that they be rel =nofollow… i.e. blogs should be set up so that the links in blogs should not be counted by the search engine spiders.

Most people are sadly uninformed about what is right and wrong in linking strategies from a search engine perspective, and most have an innate desire for overnight success.

Some people have blogs which are left wide open – you post a quote; it gets published.

We know that they already look for artificial growth in links, get too many, or get new links too quickly, and you’re likely to trip an alert. If they track it back to your site, you can pay by being delisted.

That’s why blog spam can spell overnight failure for your search engine placement: It’ll get you lots of meaningless links, and possibly delisted.