Deconstruction of a Blog Spam Comment

December 8th, 2012

I’ve gotten several of these in the past few days since putting up my new site, and thought it would be fun to take them apart in hopes of gaining some insight into the people behind these sorts of comments.

Below I have chopped up the comment into relevant pieces. My own comments follow directly below each chunk.

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization.

First of all, what is “On-Page SEO”? The next part is wrong in two ways: 1) I actually do use the first three header tags in my post where this comment was given, and 2) There are actually six header tags, not three! Lastly, I use bold and italics where I feel it helps emphasize the reading of the text.

On-Page SEO means more now than ever since the new Google update: Panda.

If I agree with any part of this spam comment, it’s this line. Google’s recent update “Panda” has dramatically affected how sites are listed in search results. The only thing to keep in mind here is that the search world is always changing, and will continue to change.

No longer are backlinks and simply pinging or sending out a RSS feed the key to getting Google PageRank or Alexa Rankings, You now NEED On-Page SEO.

Backlinks? Go back to 1995 along with your email chains, web rings, and hokey animated construction GIFs.

So what is good On-Page SEO? First your keyword must appear in the title. Then it must appear in the URL. You have to optimize your keyword and make sure that it has a nice keyword density of 3-5% in your article with relevant LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).

Isn’t this the sort of information you should be making me pay to have access to? On another level, it is interesting to see how I have no idea what On-Page SEO is, yet they don’t define it, and I am now supposed to understand what factors make it good. A good marketer is able to sell you on something you don’t need, except in this case I don’t even understand what it is that I don’t need in the first place.

Then you should spread all H1,H2,H3 tags in your article.Your Keyword should appear in your first paragraph and in the last sentence of the page.

I’m a firm believer that good SEO forms organically from the structure of the content. In a book you have at least three levels of important titles: The name of the book, the names of each chapters, and subchapters within those. This sort of SEO isn’t hard, or optimization in any sense; Writing well structured HTML should allow for good search result priority.

You should have relevant usage of Bold and italics of your keyword.

Is there any real data to back this up? I think it’s great to use bold or italics to provide emotive cues in an otherwise bland piece of writing, but I don’t think using them strategically for SEO purposes has any positive effect. I could be wrong, though.

There should be one internal link to a page on your blog and you should have one image with an alt tag that has your keyword?.

I’m fine with linking to content on my own site, as long as it’s relevant to the topic of the page. Although I doubt there is a real limit to just one image, having graphics on a page seem to keep me interested in staying on a website.

wait there’s even more Now what if i told you there was a simple WordPress plugin that does all the On-Page SEO, and automatically for you? That’s right AUTOMATICALLY, just watch this 4minute video for more information at. [removed]

Ah?the hard sell. Sorry, but based on 1) You coming to my site and posting a scripted response to an unrelated topic, 2) You being terrible at selling your product/service, and 3) The high chance that your plugin contains malware, I don’t think I’ll be trying out your plugin. Sorry!

In all seriousness though: Spam comments suck. SEO can be useful, but only to a point. I believe proper use of HTML tags can go a lot further than some seemingly clever tricks. If you want to make an impact and reach an audience, write about a topic in a direct manner and use HTML tags how they were meant to be used.

Posted under Notebook with tags , .