But still, it is a little irritating to see all the auto generated comments in your spam filters when you log in.

What’s worse is that I actually stop and check out a few of these links from time to time. Because they are not all porn and pharmacy sites. No sir, many of them are small businesses trying to promote their website. Mortgage companies, real estate agents, lawyers and retail companies. In other words, regular companies just like you and me.

Spamming a million blogs with cheap software every day in the hopes of getting a few backlinks. Probably based on a shallow promise from a really long and really convincing sales letter. Or even a recommendation from a colleague.

Sad.

Because what they don’t know is that it’s really more likely that using these software programs and automated SEO sites is hurting them more than it is helping them. Because it is blasting their links willy nilly all over the internet without any concern where they are going.

think about it for a minute. Do you want your law firm linked to adult blogs? Or Hate blogs? For that matter, do you want your site linked to other websites that are not even remotely related to you or your business?

I know, some of you are actually saying, “yes, I do want links. Thank you very much. We really, really need traffic and we don’t care where it comes from…”

But you should care. Because inappropriate backlinks do not help your site at all. They hurt you site. Guilt by association my friends. In this case, some of the content contained on the sites that link to you carry over to you. Your website is directly defined by the content of these sites. I won’t go into it today, but you can look up “Google Bowling” and see just what can happen by having bad sites link to yours.

As far as the traffic goes, why would you want traffic that is totally irrelevant? I’ll be honest with you, I’m a statistics nut. I love looking at my AWstats website statistics each and every day. I like seeing the increases and I like knowing when there is a decrease.

But I also look to see where these visitors are coming from. Because that’s important too.

I don’t want crap traffic. I don’t want traffic that has nothing to do with blogging or business. Because it doesn’t help us or our company. It’s wasted bandwidth and totally unproductive.

This is why when working on building your backlinks, you need to build them in places that will help your overall SEO. You need to build them in places where, if you do get some visitors, they will likely be visitors that are interested in your products or your services.

At the very least, you want those links to show the search engine spiders some relevancy. To build the authority of your website.

So here is my advice folks. Please don’t use automated software to blast a million blog comments. It’s not the correct way to build your backlinks and it is not the way to work on effective blog SEO.

All it really does is make more work for lots of blog owners. Making them spend more time cleaning up their comments and monitoring them. The links that you do get really aren’t that great.

In the end, all that happens is that you have dropped a few bucks on something worthless. Or even worse, something that you paid for that in the end is costing you more money than you ever imagined.

Chuck Crawford, 10 September 2008
 

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