By now you’re blogging regularly on your business site. Right? Of course right! Now that you are, you’ll be getting comments on your blog. Hopefully those comments form a useful discussion, coming from people who are genuinely interested in what you’re saying.

Alas, not all comments are from legitimate readers of your wonderful content. Especially once your site hits the tipping point for search engines to really take notice, you’ll start seeing an influx of spam on your blog comments.

Why would anyone spam a blog post?

Back in the day, search engines – especially the Google – used inbound links to help determine a site’s search ranking. Huh? In other words, their algorithm took into account all the various pages across the Web that had a link to your site. Each link was like a vote for your site. The more inbound links you had, the more “Google juice” your site got, and the better your rankings became.

Still with us?

The idea behind this was, if others found your site to be worthwhile, it must mean that you had something worth reading. That’s why, a few years back, it was all the rage to try and get a link on someone else’s site. You would frequently see pages of “Good Links” or “Our Friends,” etc. Website owners engaged in “link exchanging,” where you would post a link to someone else’s page, and that person would post a reciprocal link to your site.

That worked to boost your rankings, but boy was it a pain to cultivate those relationships and build that network of links. But now, watch out! Here comes the world of the blog! Now, suddenly, anyone who wanted to could jump onto a site and post their own links, free and clear, and have them online instantly. They would just have to hope that the site owner didn’t notice their junk comments and delete them.

That strategy worked well for a while, but in the last couple of years the almighty algorithm has shifted away from inbound links and more toward solid content. Still, the inbound link mentality persists (we still get emails offering to participate in link exchanges!), and that is why you see spam comments on your blog. Not only that, but most of the comments are posted by spam robots, and not by actual people.

Many spam comments are very obvious, but many others employ some devious tactics in order to appear legitimate and get themselves approved. Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, we’ll take a look the fun stuff – how you can recognize spam and lots of examples – next week.

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