Jul
10
Many bloggers include commenting on other blogs in their overall marketing strategy and as I have mentioned before, it’s an effective tactic. But what about paying someone else to comment on other blogs for you?
Buy Blog Comments is now promoting a service that will post comment spam on blogs for those wanting to increase their SEO ranking.
“BuyBlogComments.Com is the first of its kind. Finally you can purchase quality blog comments without the stress of finding someone to write the comments, or buying some high priced automated program. We specialize in selling blog comments for blackhatters who are looking for good quality backlinks. We have three different types of packages, you can either buy 100 blog comments, 500 blog comments, or 1000 blog comments at a time.
Blog comments help your site rank better in the SERPs. We hired a few people who go through a list of blogs in a database we set up and pick out blogs that are in your niche. They then read through blog posts and leave a comment that has to do with the blog post they read, that way it wont get deleted. Your backlink will then be on a targeted blog, giving you more weight in the search engines.”
The pricing is as follows: 100 comments for $19.99, 500 comments for $99.99, and 1000 comments for $199.99.
There are several ongoing discussions about this new service and I’m happy to report that the reaction is mostly negative. You can find examples here, here and here. Of course, John Chow thinks it’s a good idea but the pricing is too high… why am I not surprised by that?
I have to add my voice to the chorus on this one and recommend that you avoid using this service or any other service like it. Spamming your links across the blogosphere will ultimately do your blog more harm than good. And these people will be speaking on your behalf… maybe even using your name.
Do you really want to trust a stranger with your online reputation?
Popularity: 29% [?]
I couldn’t agree more.
I recently switched to dofollow, but watching the moderated comments closely. Two ways it can go.
- Like you said, bloggers pick up on it and the company gets their reputation damaged.
- People switch off dofollow on their blog, it becomes pointless.
It is spamming, but with a human face on it. Me no likey.
Anything and everything is okay with John Chow as long as it allows him to make money
Its definitely unethical. There can be no doubt about that. You are paying some one else to pretend to be you! That’s fraud. But, is this a useful service? I think so.
I think there are so many ways to look at blogging for profit and there is a whole spectrum of attitudes that occur when you’ve slipped just under teh fine gray line of ethics.
I am hoping my desire to earn a penney never crosses me over.
Besides the fact that I don’t think someone else commenting for me is right, I have a problem with the fact they cannot write properly.
In the third paragraph of the blue section on their opening page there are numerous grammatical errors….. take a read and see what I mean.
I certainly do not want someone posting in my name that cannot write properly. That would make me look kind of dumb.
If they have updated the opening page and corrected the errors you can see the original from a cut and paste at my blog.
I vote no for this one……… eric
Exactly… definitely not the kind of thing I want out there promoting me.
I’ve never understood the point of comment spam, at least as far as SEO goes. Google basically ignores links on pages that are below about PR4, so a comment on a typical blog post is worthless in terms of draining PR juice from a site.
In contrast, multiple comments on a site like Sciencebase that runs the Top Commentators Plugin will allow a dedicated commenter to get their link right on to the blog homepage (which is a PR7). Now, if you were unethical that plugin would be the way to go to game sites like that.
Of course, Akismet and a wary and sharp-eyed moderator will see right through the cr*p-flood, anyway.
db
You make a valid point David … Sing it from the Roof Tops!
Darin
Lame service! I completely agree with you, David. One of my favorite things about blogging is the community interaction. Spam comments irritate me.
I’m sure a lot of people will pay for this service. i just hope it doesn’t turn into the few ruining it for the many. Google finds ways to “rethink” its results all the time and I’m sure they could find a way to change the algorithm to exclude comments.
And, as Pallab said, it’s no surprise John Chow loves it. He openly admits to being evil and I firmly believe there’s no way he could have started making the amount he does without employing some black hat tactics.
Sara
I’m not spamming a I promise!
I can’t stop thinking about the ramifications of this. There’s been much mention of damage it could do to a blogger’s reputation and the more I think about it, the scarier it is. What if the people writing the spamments start sharing their personal opinions. An liberal blogger who writes in a sarcastic style could suddenly have their rep changed to a cranky homophobic overnight.
Blog comments are largely based on opinion and this company could go around leaving “great!” spamments on crappily-written posts and “I totally agree!” when it’s something completely against your beliefs.
Not only is this unethical, it’s something a blogger should consider carefully before they decide to use the service. $20 per 100 comments means the spammers aren’t being paid all that much so I doubt they’ll be paying attention to the personal values of the bloggers they are representing.
Sara
This would be my concern also…..there’s no way that I would pay anyone to comment using my name and url….who the heck knows what they would say, much less how they would spell!!
With my name on a misspelled, inane comment, it’s not worth the link! Good point too, Sarach, re: a paid commenter writing that they agree with some unknown blog post under your name on a topic that you wouldn’t even consider reading about in the first place.
This is just bad news all around if you really want to build any kind of credibility and respect, not just with your audience, but with yourself.
A service like that would be nice to use on occasion, but as others have said, what kind of quality are you getting for twenty bucks.
If I were able to hire someone to post comments for me, I would want to make sure they were doing a quality job, were literate, and would not hurt the reputation of the site.
If anyone needs someone to post comments on blogs for them, I can be had for about 50 bucks an hour with no guarantee of the number of comments. Alright, I will guarantee at least two. lol
I prefer to spam on my own, one comment at a time.
But if anyone would like me to spam for them, I charge $50/comment.
My comments probably have about a 1 in 10 shot of not getting deleted by moderators, so it’s closer to $500/comment.
I accept all major credit cards and Paypal. Thank you for your business.
Ug, I just ripped off Adam’s comment above me without even knowing.
So another disclosure on my service. I will not research or read any posts or comments before commenting. Duplicate and/or unresearched ideas may be posted.
I have seen your comments so I’m guessing 1 in 10 is being a little conservative…
Its all good Joe…who hasn’t commented before reading all the comments…I like the $500 per comment price…that would be sweet. Work an hour a day at most.
I agree with most of you too, this is a bad idea. I rather comment on my own because I actually enjoy it. Also, I wouldn’t trust anyone else with my online reputation and if I really wanted links I could buy them direct or even better write good content which builds me links naturally.
ive seen tons of online debate about it, but i dont really care since it isnt a service i would use or really afford.
However i could see it being beneficial for a bigger company etc, trying to build backlinks on Do follow blogs/top comment lists
or even a new website.
I believe and hope that most of the bloggers will never use this service.
And I thought I was the only douchebag who thought of an idea like that. Fortunately I never did it – though my laziness can be mistaken for conscience.
Love that phrase “laziness can be mistaken for conscience.”
$0.10 per comment in some third world countries could be considered good money.
OK – I’m not a fan of spam, but how is this unethical. What ethics are you talking about? I’d be happy if someone put relevant comments on my blog regardless of their motivation. So long as the comments are of good quality, I say cheers. Some idiot is at home getting paid $0.10 per blog comment, some blogger thinks people actually care about his/her writings, and some other dude is getting traffic and rankings (yep, even w/ the nofollow).
Hi Medicus Man,
I can’t answer for anybody else but here is my take…
Conversation is what sets blogs apart from the normal website and I want to promote interaction and conversation. I feel that I bend over backwards in an effort to do this… I have removed the nofollow tag from all comments, I have added the top commentators plugin, I do the Weekend Links where commentators get free links and get their posts submitted to StumbleUpon, I even run contests for commentators.
What do I ask in return? Well, if you want to reap the benefits of what I offer, I expect you to not only comment but contribute by joining the conversation. These people aren’t interested in contributing to the community… all they are after is the link. A single comment by some scumbag drive-by commentator is not a contribution and should not be rewarded.
And think about the math for second. I won’t go over the numbers here because it has been mentioned in several places already but there is NO WAY these can be quality comments. The economics just don’t make sense. What you are going to get is either some kind of automated spam bot or someone who doesn’t read the actual articles and just posts the standard garbage comment like the one that just came through here…
That comment was posted 1 second… 1 freaking second… after the page was loaded. He really took the time to digest the material and post a quality comment.
Sorry, that doesn’t add to the conversation and I don’t want that crap here.
I believe I’ve been getting these paid comments now, which were easy to spot because the person making the comments used the same email address and comment for each comment, all on the same blog post, and posted the same comment text on each! The only thing that was different was the web site link, and the commenter’s name.
I think it’s possible that you won’t always know if the comment was paid for or not, because if the employee/hired hand actually reads the post and uses their mind to come up with an original comment, then you won’t know.
This is all the more reason to keep comment moderation on in full force on your blog.
David,
You’ve certainly spoken for me.
Medicus Man, It’s unethical for the reasons David just listed above. Certainly no real “rules” are being broken, however the value of a comment is relative.
I consider a valuable comment to be one that has been written by a person who has read the post, actually cares to comment on it and is writing on behalf of him/herself. I think if you’re paying someone to comment for you just to get links then you are not contributing anything of value.
Blog comments aren’t meant to be “hey! great job!” valentines. They’re meant to extend the conversation and connect the community. I don’t complain when someone comments that they like my blog, but I’d rather someone disagree with me if it creates an opportunity for dialog. As David said, it’s the conversational nature of blogs that sets them apart from other types of sites.
Sara
You can hire offshore in India or the Philippines a full time writer for $250-$500 through an agency and get 40 hours per week. They produce about 3000-6000 words per day depending on the task, subject, …. They write blog post, comments, craigslist, articles, link building or whatever else you ask for that time. The only difference is the packaging of buying a fixed number of comments instead.
People are already doing this, the difference is in the packaging of the work in per post instead of per hour.
The whole thing boils down to the quality of comment post in all cases because “hi, I like your blog” will get deleted on my sites as spam.
David Culpepper,
You got hit by a post bot, they scrape ping services then comment on the post from the services rss feeds. Very easy process that does not need any advanced coding unless they need to crack a captcha but even that is easily available, just needs a little more programing.
These comment bots scraping rss feeds are the real Blackhat webmasters. The script could be written for a few hundred dollars and send out 1000-10,000 comments per hour depending on issues I will not go into.
final note:
What gives me a big smile is “blackhatters who are looking for good quality” tells me right away they know nothing about BH SEO
Actually, there is a flip side to all of this. If those guys are being paid to spam, then presumably they are going to use their brains and actually read an item, if so, then they might actually add an original thought to a post, stimulate further discussion, and make many blogs more dynamic as a result. It could turn out to be a good thing for the blogosphere. The price paid will be the inclusion of a worthless text link to some spurious site that you as moderator could edit out anyway!
db
Blogged about this myself. One more reason to use comment moderation.
this is no good – I want to see if I can gather or find a list of IPs that are associated with buyblogcomments.com.
there has to be a button or something that we can represent
Creative! Although I don’t agree buying spam comment for increase blog comment (I love natural SEO even I don’t get much money from it), but still they think a really great idea for making the service. I see from the originality prespective, the make a original service to public. Making a original idea is really hard this day. Because of their originality and being discussed in many blogs, they become famous now.
If I were making enough on my blog to pay someone 20 bucks for 10 comments, I think the trickle it would generate would be pointless.
I can make 20 comments in a few minutes if the entries are short and when the hate mail starts pouring in, I won’t be surprised.
I really don’t think buying blog comments is that big of a deal. If they allow for the monitoring of the comments by the blogger, than it would, in theory, be a great idea. In return you might get people who are also interested in your blog. There are thousands of blogs to pick from and just to be honored in the fact they chose your blog says something. It at least shows you have people who would want to read your blog and it shows you could have marketability.
What is the actual return for the cutomer, though, if bloggers either delete said comments or strip out the URL?
I think it’s a novel idea and $0.2 a comment isn’t that much if it’s well done. Would rather that then pay someone from India $0.05 a comment and risk having most removed. Also the comment is an introduction to your potential visitors you want it to be done properly. Finally lots of us have 9-5’s commenting is just a somewhat productive procrastination tool!
I think we probably all agree it’s fundamentally not a good idea. I have to wade through enough spam as it is what with half a dozen used email accounts and the same again in terms of blogs.
db
[...] blogs across the globe, for a fee. Several blogs such as ProBlogger (who describes it as sick) and PureBlogging have come down hard on the idea. The company claims that multiple placed spam comments (it costs [...]
[...] Buying Blog Comments [...]
I would certainly avoid this, too. I would never allow someone to imitate me, just think what it could do to your reputation.
I still take issues with paid forum posting, but at least the posters don’t assume your identity. This new concept seems far riskier from a professional standpoint.
- Martin Reed
got a email a few days ago about buying comments … $0.50 cents a pop …
Darin
[...] have no problem buying blog comments. However, in the comments at PureBlogging it is pointed out that the Buy Blog Comments site is fraught with bad grammar. In addition you [...]
I like the idea, but I think that kind of money can be better spent buying your fellow bloggers drinks!
Thats just wrong and pricey too.
I guess people will turn anything into a way to make money. But with a price like that you’re better off doing it yourself.
Sooo wrong. Trusting someone else who you really don’t know to effectively market your company by junk/spam comments could be tad risky to say the least.