I had the privilege of meeting Danah Boyd at this year’s BlogHer. I always enjoy reading the results of her efforts to apply her enormous brainpower to the world of social networking. Today, she posted about the marketers who have recently been using her comment section as an SEO tool. “Dear online marketers,” she wrote, “I am not humored that you wish to use my blog to up your pagerank. I’m not stupid. It’s obvious you’re posting pithy comments debasing competitors on lots of highly trafficked entries with your URL and the search terms you wish to associate with your company.”
Danah has every right to be irritated at this behavior. I spend about an hour each week deleting comments like this from our spam trap. It puts me in a bad mood every single time.
Don’t get me wrong, as a business blogger, I recognize that comments on other blogs are a big part of the marketing equation. But there is a thin line between using other people’s comments as a marketing tool and becoming an out-and-out spammer. If you want to avoid having bloggers associate your company with the scum of the Web, then you need to think a little more organically.
Genuine participation in the conversation means interacting in a thoughtful, relevant and timely way with other bloggers that share your interests. It’s the only way to engage in SEO without deeply pissing off the bloggers. You have to actually show some enthusiasm for the conversation and the SEO will follow organically.
There are two kinds of SEO practices in the blogosphere, those that require interaction with others and those that do not. Non-interactional tactics include making sure your code is clean and creatively integrating your target search terms into the headlines of your posts. Those are the kinds of things you can do with your goal of more search engine traffic in mind.
But when you’re interacting with other bloggers, you need to be a little less goal-oriented. Instead of keeping your eye on the SEO prize, focus on having an interesting conversation about a passion you share. The inbound links and search engine love will naturally follow at least some of the time. This isn’t a system you can game. It has nothing to do with “link exchanges” to fool search engines. It’s about developing personal relationships.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Denise aka The Blog Squad 11.13.06 at 1:00 pm
Thanks for this post, Teresa. This has been top of mind for me today as a reader used a comment to promote his own blogging service in direct competition with ours. He had some useful feedback and then proceeded to boost himself. I deleted that part. Using comments is definitely an important way to interact in the blogosphere, but do it wisely. As you say, “it’s about developing personal relationships.”
I also recently learned that most blogging platforms, at least the hosted ones like TypePad, have an automatic no follow tag on the URL field for comments. So in fact, there is no SEO benefit. The benefit is participating and perhaps providing enough value in your comment to entice others to check out your blog.
Teresa Valdez Klein 11.13.06 at 1:32 pm
Denise: In SEO terms, the value-add of commenting on someone else’s blog isn’t necessarily inbound links. It’s awareness. The blogger becomes aware of you and so do his/her readers.
Say enough interesting things and you’ll pick up some new readers, who may also link to you. It’s all organic.
steven e. streight aka vaspers the grate 11.14.06 at 6:38 pm
I’m against SEO when it comes to posting and commenting for pagerank considerations.
I could make every post have “web usability” in the title, but that’s artificial and my readers would see it as contrived and stupid, annoying, opportunistic.
I personally feel you should never post comments with any URLs in them, since that is 98% spam, and as a spam tactic you taint yourself. URLs pointing to substantiating documentation, information relevant to a thread, with no commercial motive, is okay, though.
Beyond SEO: if you post frequently about a given topic, in your own natural style, without a craven eye to pagerank, you gain credibility.
Spamdexing and opportunistic comment posting or blog titling is a loser’s way to achieve what will eventually be lost again.
Experts will be known by their information relevance and wisdom, not by contrivances and SEO gimmicks.
SEO nuts usually forget that blog traffic is qualitative as well as quantitative.