Blogs are an important tool for B2B marketing, as any inbound marketer worth their salt will tell you. They’re a great place to build credibility, demonstrate your brilliance on whatever topic it is that you want the industry to know you for, and start a bit of conversation flowing with some of the braver souls who are willing to publicly comment.
Not surprisingly, there’s tons of advice about blogging floating around in the digital ether. So let me just address one issue today: blog spamming.
[My apologies for the slightly tacky cartoon, but I couldn’t resist. I am fascinated by 3D printing. The spammers are sure to find a way to exploit that hot topic.]
Blog spamming is popular primarily as a way to get to the top of the search rankings. The rationale is that active blogs carry high authorship cred with the search engines. If you comment on the blog, especially a popular post, then a link from that comment back to your site is a win for your incoming links program.
NOTE: If you don’t know by now, content and incoming links are the primary drivers of search rankings.
Because of this spam commenting behavior, many popular blogs don’t allow links in comments. Gotta love those spammers for constantly messing up the legit work of we marketers. Sigh. Personally, I don’t mind links in blog comments as long as they’re from legit people who are making relevant comments. To ensure that, you need to moderate all comments on your blog. Otherwise you’re going to have a bunch of comments that look like the following (actual spam I just received):
Gladiola?!?! Too funny.
But blog spammers are getting cleverer. I just found the following comment on one of our client’s blogs:
Author: Kati Roese (IP: [deleted by me])
E-mail: [deleted by me]@gmail.com
URL: http://
Whois: [deleted by me]
Comment:
Modern vehicle manufacturing nearly always includes a complete system of some kind from the factory when the car is assembled. This is referred to as the ‘stock’ system, or OEM system. These systems can be supplied by an exclusive vendor to the manufacturer to their specification, or other company that specializes in design or production of such equipment.”
Remember to look at our new internet site
<+"http://www.caramoan.ph/caramoan-islands/
This comment was added to a blog post that covered some of the cooler technologies at CES 2013. In that post, we mentioned the “connected car” — which I find fascinating from a technology perspective.
So, I had to stop and think before I deleted the post. It’s a fluffy comment, sure, but it’s got enough appropriate keywords that it makes you stop and think. Then I read down and saw the link to some islands in the Philippines and realized it was yet another spam. But I had to admit, it was better written than the usual nonsensical characters or the “I really like the way you think in this blog post, man” comments.
In the end, keep doing your blogging thing on a regular basis. But moderate all comments. Give guests the ability to set up profiles as you want to encourage regular participation. But moderate those, too. One of the blogs we work on just got hit with 30 spams in a row from the same site trying to set up a profile. Good luck with that 🙂
B2B Blogging: Anatomy of a Spam Comment
Blogs are an important tool for B2B marketing, as any inbound marketer worth their salt will tell you. They’re a great place to build credibility, demonstrate your brilliance on whatever topic it is that you want the industry to know you for, and start a bit of conversation flowing with some of the braver souls who are willing to publicly comment.
Not surprisingly, there’s tons of advice about blogging floating around in the digital ether. So let me just address one issue today: blog spamming.
[My apologies for the slightly tacky cartoon, but I couldn’t resist. I am fascinated by 3D printing. The spammers are sure to find a way to exploit that hot topic.]
Blog spamming is popular primarily as a way to get to the top of the search rankings. The rationale is that active blogs carry high authorship cred with the search engines. If you comment on the blog, especially a popular post, then a link from that comment back to your site is a win for your incoming links program.
NOTE: If you don’t know by now, content and incoming links are the primary drivers of search rankings.
Because of this spam commenting behavior, many popular blogs don’t allow links in comments. Gotta love those spammers for constantly messing up the legit work of we marketers. Sigh. Personally, I don’t mind links in blog comments as long as they’re from legit people who are making relevant comments. To ensure that, you need to moderate all comments on your blog. Otherwise you’re going to have a bunch of comments that look like the following (actual spam I just received):
Gladiola?!?! Too funny.
But blog spammers are getting cleverer. I just found the following comment on one of our client’s blogs:
This comment was added to a blog post that covered some of the cooler technologies at CES 2013. In that post, we mentioned the “connected car” — which I find fascinating from a technology perspective.
So, I had to stop and think before I deleted the post. It’s a fluffy comment, sure, but it’s got enough appropriate keywords that it makes you stop and think. Then I read down and saw the link to some islands in the Philippines and realized it was yet another spam. But I had to admit, it was better written than the usual nonsensical characters or the “I really like the way you think in this blog post, man” comments.
In the end, keep doing your blogging thing on a regular basis. But moderate all comments. Give guests the ability to set up profiles as you want to encourage regular participation. But moderate those, too. One of the blogs we work on just got hit with 30 spams in a row from the same site trying to set up a profile. Good luck with that 🙂
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