The other day I posted this rant about an Australian company using comment spam on my blog. Further investigation revealed six comment spams from the one iiNet IP address - 203.217.2.46. Several of them were spamvertising Australian companies, including the first one, Adamant Solutions; as well as Washroom Products of Mawson Lakes, South Australia; ERW Engineering of St Helens Park, NSW; Unreel Fishing Charters of Melbourne; Mini Bins Adelaide; and Anything Hot Water of the Gold Coast.
The owner of the last one contacted me about the rant. As it turns out, he had paid an SEO company called SiteClick (run by the aforementioned Adamant Solutions!) to increase his website's Google rankings. If you look at their website, one of the things on it is this:
Link Building Campaign
 | Your website is submitted to thousands of online directories, websites and online article resources by our trained link building campaign staff. Submissions are setup and managed by our team of highly trained Search Engine Optimisation specialists. |
So they submit their site to thousands of websites. In other words, they use the comments feature of my blog to post a link back to these other company's websites. In the blogiverse this is known as comment spamming and it PISSES US ALL OFF!!!! It may not be illegal but it's damned dirty.
You know those ads for places that let you "work from home" and "all you have to do is fill in forms on the internet"? This is what those people do. They employ humans to get around the ReCaptchas on blogs which prevent bots from doing it.
These poor unsuspecting companies have paid SiteClick to increase their Google rankings, at the expense of giving themselves a bad name on the internet and enraging bloggers like me.
Glen
Hi there,
i think its ridculous your sledging my company like this, i am only a small owner operator business,
i have no idea about SEO ect,
i have paid a company to handle this, so whatever spam you are getting is not me personally,
so, is the company i am using, using a cheap cheat way of ranking in google results?
Kazza the Blank One
What they are doing is called comment spamming. They fill in a form on my blog with some inane comment, with a hyperlink back to your website. The idea being to increase your google rankings because of extra links back to your website. As a blogger who has to deal with this crap I can tell you I have no patience with it. For overseas companies I just delete them, because honestly what can else you do. But for Australian companies to do it is just so completely wrong. Most Australians understand how infuriating spam is. So for an Australian company to do it is appalling. The company you are paying is using "dirty" methods which is doing nothing but pissing off bloggers like me. The company you are using has a host at iinet, and I've received six comment spams from that IP address this year, several spamvertising Australian websites.
If you want good Google rankings, do it the right way, with good content and page styling. Don't pay lowlife spammers.