Aral Balkan

Buy Blog Comments is a new business that sells blog spam. Do not support these people. How is this even legal?

The guy behind it is apparently one Jon Waraas. I hate blog spammers, Mr. Waraas, and something tells me that I'm not alone in that. I wonder if Mr. Waraas has set himself up to be one of the most hated 19-year-olds on the Internet.

Read more about it on Mashable! and Read/WriteWeb.

Comments

• well, 1) not all blogs have nofollow attribute for links 2) if you go and type "buy viagra" and then see the back links for the most pages from the top you will see that it doesn't matter what PR they have - in fact most of the backlinks for those page are guestbook & blog spam. 3) Aral, why did you put the link to them (without nofollow ;) ) you are basiclly helping them to increase their positions in serps.

  by Alex on 2007-07-12 13:41:05

• @Alex: Thanks for pointing that out -- I just added rel="nofollow" attributes to those links.

  by Aral on 2007-07-12 17:47:57

• The solution is simple. 1. Google and other SE's need to actually enforce nofollow. Lots of empirical evidence that they do not. 2. Implement various anti-spam turing methods. When nofollow was introduced, only a small % of blogs had anti-spam methods. There are even 3rd party services in addition to turing tests to help prevent spam. There is real value in allowing blog commenters whatever minimal link credit they might get from a comment link. Don't punish the legitimate commentors, deal with the problem before it even gets in the door. Nofollow is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Fix the problem as its root, i.e. prevent the spam in the first place. There are real methods to do this that will solve 95% of all comment spam. The remaining 5% is either tolerable (e.g. thinly disguised comment spam from outsourced human services to bypass turing tests)... or can be solved with moderation or a self-policing system like on craigslist and various forums.

  by Tom on 2007-07-25 04:35:44

• I’ve never understood the point of comment spam, at least as far as SEO goes. Google basically ignores links on pages that are below about PR4, so a comment on a typical blog post is worthless in terms of draining PR juice from a site. In contrast, multiple comments on a site like Sciencebase.com that runs the Top Commentators Plugin will allow a dedicated commenter to get their link right on to the blog homepage (which is a PR7). Now, if you were unethical that plugin would be the way to go to game sites like that. Of course, Akismet and a wary and sharp-eyed moderator will see right through the cr*p-flood, anyway. db

  by David Bradley on 2007-07-10 16:30:04

• Wow this is cool! I always wanted to have hundreds of SPAM comments on my blog! Now I can even pay money for it! How can this not be good!? ;)

  by sascha/hdrs on 2007-07-11 02:51:05

• nice I think I might join and kill my online brand - gosh this must be the worst idea yet and this jon warASS is definitely gon to be hated in the blog community

  by Iantrepreneur on 2007-07-11 14:28:31

• Yes you are right Google basically ignores links with nofollow, so a comment on a typical blog post is worthless !!!

  by Chris on 2007-07-11 16:33:42

• Personally I think way and I mean way to much is being made over this. Some bloggers in the dofollow community are actually talking about going back to adding nofollow over this. That is just plain stupid. The way I feel is simple is a person comments in my blogs, the comment is relevant and on topic and the link does not go to some “bad thing” and otherwise complies with my comment policy I am fine with it. Who actually wrote the comment and what the “intent” was means absolutely nothing to me only that it meets the rules of my personal comment policy. Everyone needs to realize that this is nothing but the latest topic du jour and just have a beer and rock on with life. Basically those saying nofollow is the solution to this are saying, Comment spam gave birth to rel="nofollow", people realized it did nothing to solve the problem and screwed over posters. So the do-follow movement occurred which has led to people comment spamming, which means we might as well use nofollow again, which did not work in the first place. Sound like a circle of insanity? There's a reason, it is! The simple facts are if the comments are relevant to your blog, who cares if the poster or the guy who hired him gets some link juice? Anyone who does can’t see the forest for the trees! The reality is comments make your blog better; they improve your search traffic as well. I believe all they hype around this is being swelled underground by Google because they hate the dofollow movement! They are trying to kill any paid links or any links a user can easily create or hire someone else to create. Why? Because they can’t fix their own algorithms, that’s why. This "war on paid links" has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with money, don't be fooled and stop worrying. The Internet has done fine for a long time now and it keeps getting better, like us or not SEOs are a big part of why

  by Jack Spirko on 2007-07-12 15:38:45

• I do think that the automated comment spam that I have seen once on my own blog absolutely needs to be done away with. I also think that Jack makes some very good points above. As long as it is readers, reading blogs to get different perspectives and ideas who are making relevant comments to an open discussion. I don't wee a problem there. Isn't that what blogs are for? To facilitate the exchange of ideas.

  by Bruce Swedal on 2007-07-17 19:31:49

• I like the fact that he calls it the "blogspear" not "blogsphere", as it's commonly known. There's education at it's best. He is an incredibly sketchy person, to be sure.

  by hugh on 2007-07-26 17:43:37

• this must be the worst idea yet and this is definitely gon to be hated in the blog community, back links for the most pages from the top you will see that it doesn’t matter what PR they have, That is just plain stupid. The way I feel is simple is a person comments in my blogs, the comment is relevant and on topic and the link does not go to some “bad thing” and otherwise complies with my comment policy I am fine with it.

  by Marky45 on 2007-08-11 20:29:58

• This guys just jealous the guy is making money, your nothing but jealous all your trying to do is knock his money making scheme. Why get jealous when somebody makes money? Leave the guy alone if he wants to spam and earn for a living then thats what he wants to do.

  by bela on 2007-08-13 18:51:06

• @bela: Bless, are we a little slow or are we a spammer too? Blog spam is theft. You're *stealing* from bloggers. You have no right whatsoever to spam a blog. It's not your space. You're illegally putting your advertising (stealing space, benefiting from page rank and clicks) on the blog that you're spamming. And you are poisoning the information on that blog and doing a disservice to anyone reading it. If you're a spammer, you're nothing but a petty thief and a nuisance.

  by Aral on 2007-08-13 19:01:36

• Garbage comments suck, whether on blogs or forums. Fortunately for Wordpress users, the combination of akismet and moderation will make it a non-issue. Unless your blog gets John Chow kind of traffic I imagine.

  by mlankton on 2007-09-21 13:19:53

• Nice on the nofollow. As long as search engines look as the number of links to the site rather then content on the site this sort of spam thing will just keep on happening

  by Steve on 2007-12-09 17:10:35

• I wanted to comment and thank the author, good stuff

  by Money on 2009-04-03 15:41:56

• Hi, Just thought I'd let you recognize your website is rendering weird in my K-melleon browser. Looks good from what I can see however.

  by Click on 2009-11-30 09:39:38

• Hehe. The funny thing about this article/blog post is, that the first two or last two comments "money" and "click" or blatantly blog comment spam and you approved their comments. They have keywords as name as their comments are as general as a comment can be. You have fallen into the trap :)

  by Hjemmeside on 2011-04-05 14:43:35