Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Optimisation’

Spam comment for search engine optimisation: A complete no!

Monday, May 10th, 2010

There’s a subtle but distinct difference between a Spam Comment and Blog Comment in general. A well constructed relevant comment that adds value to a blog, with a no follow website link is genuine blog commenting. It is valued by every blog owner and they may even reward you with a backlink from another post to acknowledge your input. But when you come across a single word or two word comment with a site link or an unrelated gibberish comment, it becomes a spam.

Spam comments or blog spams abuse the comments field of sites with backlinks to their own site to boost their search rankings for better search engine optimisation. It not only belittles other people’s hard work but is also risky for the spammers as this can lead to their site being blacklisted by search engines. Google and other search engines have long wizened up to this tactic and developed algorithms to detect and devalue comment spam and links. Thus it is much more worthwhile to utilize the same time and energy for SEO article submission, affordable press release distribution and manual directory submission that are some of the guaranteed methods of boosting one’s search rankings.

It is better to use affordable SEO strategy and regularly update your website with useful and original content that will attract visitors as well as search engine spiders to your site. And although blog comments do not provide you with any link juice, they still are useful in making your target audience aware of your existence and promoting your products and services. With short, precise, conversational comments in popular blogs, you can also encourage the Google spiders to index your site faster. Use blog commenting as a social media marketing tool to encourage discussions and for a direct interface with your audience and customers.

To reduce and prevent spam comments on your website, try and use some of these simple and effective techniques:

Use comment moderation to manually review and approve comments before they appear on your site.

Get your bloggers to prove they are real live humans by using CAPTCHAs. This can prevent automatic comment spamming.

Make it compulsory for bloggers to leave their email address with their comments to prevent anonymous posts.

Add default ‘no follow’ attribute to all posted comments.

If possible, change your server configuration to remove hyperlinks from comments.

Turn off the comments page with Meta tags and robots.txt file to prevent Google from indexing the page.

Finally, if you have used comment spam technique in the past on other websites and want to correct your mistake, browse through your incoming links in Webmaster Tools and delete all the spam links you once created. Then file a request with Google to reconsider your site for rankings.

Is linking sites from the same class C block ineffective for search engine optimisation?

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

It is believed that search engines may consider linking among sites belonging to same Class C block as triangular linking scheme and thus do not award credit to such links. From search engine optimisation perspective these links won’t be penalized though by the search engines.

First of all what are Class C Block of IPs? How would one know if the sites belong to same Class C block? Many get confused with Class C IP block as the 3rd octet in IP address; i.e. CC in AA.BB.CC.xx. This may not be technically correct.

The IPv4 addressing with respect to classful networks implies that the Class C addresses will have the first octet in 192 – 223 range. Here AA.BB.CC signifies the network ID and xx signifies the actual host ID. Thus a single Class C block would have 2,097,151 network addresses and each network address would have 254 host addresses. Hence AA.BB.CC put together signify a Class C Block and not just the third octet CC.

It is really difficult to acquire multiple IPs in different Class C Blocks, especially if one is hosting all the sites on the same hosting server. Although it is possible with large hosts that one may explicitly request the sites to have IPs on different Class C blocks. But by default, this is not taken care of.

If one back link comes from 195.12.1.1 and another comes from 195.12.1.2, they would be considered one and the same by the search engines. The value of these links may not be of much use and this is one the ways for the search engines to find related sites.