If you’re pro-white-hat SEO then you’re going to love this post…
If you’re a WordPress blog owner like me then no doubt you’ll also be sick of the amount of blog comment spam your blog receives. This blog gets about 100-150 spam comments per day and because Akismet isn’t 100% accurate – and I’ve had quite a few false-positives (genuine comments marked as spam) – I usually have to glance through them all manually. Ack!
Why do people blog comment spam? It’s usually the case with lazy, ignorant or opportunist SEOs who want to get a lot of links easily. Using something like ScrapeBox or XRumer (note: link to Wikipedia, not to them directly), black-hats can fire off hundreds of comments on blogs. If even a fraction go live – on blogs that don’t allow for moderation or by blog owners who think they’re genuine – then that’s a fair few links for little effort.
…Or is it?
The Experiment
A while back, a friend of mine (a fellow SEO) and I decided to conduct an experiment. We would both try to find blog commenting opportunities and also leave comments on blogs linking to the same site, but take two different approaches:
His approach was slightly grey-hat: he used ScrapeBox to find the opportunities, although he would then submit to them manually with your typical generic “great post,” “this is amazeballs” and “you make me weak at the knees, good sir” type comments.
My approach was 100% white-hat: I would find blogs manually, actually read the content of the posts and reply with a meaningful comment that actually aligns with and responds to the post.
Given the fact that my friend was using a semi-black-hat/grey-hat approach, you’ll have to forgive me – and I’m sure you’ll understand – why I’m not revealing his identity. There you go, I said “his” – I’ve narrowed it down 50% for you. đ
Oh and we only had one hour (each) to do it. Game on!
The Results – Submission
The first phase was the scouting and submitting part of the process.
My ScrapeBoxing friend searched for blogs by keywords relevant to the site we were linking to. He found dozens of opportunities. However, as I mentioned previously, he still decided to submit to them manually. But hey, at least the first part was taken care of automatically, and sometimes finding the relevant blogs can be harder and more time-consuming than submitting to them.
By the time he was done, he had submitted comments on thirty blogs. As I said earlier though, they were fairly standard, generic comments. But still… thirty comments. That’s a lot in one hour – about one every two minutes.
Then it was my turn… Using an advanced Google search (probably something like [inurl:blog keyword] and set only to show pages from the past month), finding relevant blogs via my approach took longer and was more time-consuming. I found quite a few, sure, but with some of them, either they didn’t allow comments or I didn’t know how best to reply to the post, so inevitably I ended up visiting and reading more blog posts than actually commenting on them. I then took the time to carefully craft a response, something that the blog owner would surely appreciate and therefore publish.
How many did I manage? A paltry four – about one every fifteen minutes.
So, thirty vs… four. Ha. Here’s a graph to visually depict the difference:
Yeah, it’s not looking very good, is it?
But wait, there’s more…!
The Results – Approval
Submission is one thing, but what’s the point if they don’t even go live?
We waited a couple of weeks before revisiting all the blogs that we’d commented on, in order to allow ample time for them to be approved.
How many of the ScrapeBoxer’s comments went live, bearing in mind he’d submitted thirty? You ready? Wait for it…
One.
Yep, just one. Out of thirty. That’s a 3% success rate. Bahahaha! Sorry mate.
How many of mine went live? All four. A 100% success rate. Not only that, but two of the comments gained responses from other readers and/or the blog owners themselves, and – in one instance – I was also approached by one of the bloggers about a guest blog post opportunity.
Four comments may not sound incredible, but a) they encouraged interactions and led to other potential opportunities, and b) it still kicked the arse of the black-hat approach anyway, so there…!
Using the same scale as the previous graph, here’s the difference when it comes to the actual number of links acquired:
Who knew the quality approach would actually lead to more quantity, too?
The Conclusion
Don’t be disheartened, white-hats. I for one never would’ve suspected that a black-hat-led approach such as this would’ve failed so miserably. In fact, even if there had been more successful, with more than one comment going live, would it have led to the guest blogging opportunity or the replies from other readers? Probably not.
If anything, this just goes to show the importance of understanding the difference between links submitted and links that actually go live. After all, saying you’ve submitted links to thirty different sites may sound impressive, but if very few actually go live then what’s the point?
Anyway… Hooray for white-hat, long live white-hat, etc. Let’s just enjoy this small victory.
Over the past year, Italian SEO and inbound marketer Alessio Madeyski (@madeale on Twitter) has been running a great series called Meet Your SEO. Every week, Alessio would interview an individual working in the SEO industry, usually asking them the same set of questions. For us working in the industry, it was interesting to get very personal insights into the best tips, biggest pet peeves and favourite drinks (caffeinated, alcoholic or otherwise!) of renowned SEOs based all over the world.
Before recently deciding to take a hiatus on the series, Alessio had accumulated 32 interviews: 31 Meet Your SEO interviews as well as one Meet Your Marketer interview. I approached Alessio and asked if he would mind if I analysed the interviews, basically consolidating all the answers and seeing what the ‘combined’ answers would be from this portion of people in the industry. I’m glad to report that Alessio gave me his blessing to do so, which is fantastic.
In addition to the 32 from Alessio’s site, I’ve also included Gaz Copeland of Stoked SEO’s ‘takeover’ interview, where he interviewed the interviewer over on his site. So it’s 33 in all.
Geography
Firstly, some general geographical information:
The US was the most highly represented country, with 16 (48%) interviewees. The UK came second with 8 (24%). Other countries included Canada, Germany (twice), Israel, Italy, Pakistan, the Philippines and Spain (twice).
Out of the US states, Pennsylvania was the most highly represented, with 4 interviewees (and I’m pretty sure most – if not all – of them are based in or near Philadelphia). Joint-second were California, North Carolina and New Jersey with 2 each. The rest were Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
When did you enter the SEO world, and why?
The when wasn’t straightforward to calculate, as some people gave vague-ish answers – e.g. covering a range of years – or no answer at all, so it may not be 100% accurate, but here’s a graph roughly depicting 29 of the answers:
To put it another way, almost half of the interviewees entered SEO around 2006-8.
As an aside, it’s very encouraging how some of the industry’s best and brightest have only been in the industry for a few short years. For example, Jason Acidre (aka Kaiserthesage) has only been doing SEO since 2010, which I found truly astonishing given the quality and insight of his blog posts and his ranking on Inbound.org. It’s inspirational to those who are new to SEO – there’s nothing to say that you can’t join the industry now and be one of its best by 2014…
As for the why, that’s even harder, given that every response was personal and unique to each individual. Two things I picked up on are that some people discovered SEO after starting their own websites, while others stumbled into it purely by accident.
I accidentally became an SEO on February 26, 2010 â thatâs the date when I was first hired to be an SEO by an Australian-based SEO agency, and I didnât know anything about it, even what SEO means during that time! I needed the money that time (because of I have to, for my son), so I tried searching for a writing job, then I emailed this agency, as I saw their job posting on craigslist, then when they emailed me back, they asked if Iâll be interested to work as an SEO for them instead of being a writer (they thought/feel that Iâm fit for the job), so I said yes.
Optimising the title tag was given as the most popular onsite tip. Other honourable mentions include:
Having a good internal linking structure
Writing naturally (i.e. not forcing keywords into copy)
Writing unique content site-wide
Implementing rich snippets (e.g. Schema.org)
Title tag, everybody knows itâs important but very few people know the real art of crafting the right title that can help the website to get benefit from search engine and at the same time it looks really catchy to the reader.
The most stupid thing people believe about onpage optimization?
8 people (24%) mentioned keyword density as this biggest onsite pet peeve, regarding how people believe there to be a magic percentage and that they have to abide by it. The next most popular was keyword stuffing, with 4 mentions (12%).
The most popular link building tip? Building relationships and networking. Other honourable mentions:
Conducting outreach
Planning strategy
Encouraging natural linking
Network, network, network. I follow the PR approach to link building, build relationships with people. Search for the influencers in your niche who have the power to broadcast your message and get to know them.
The most stupid thing you heard about linkbuilding?
The answers here were very varied! Almost everyone gave a unique answer or spoke about a different aspect of bad/dodgy link building. However, a couple of people each mentioned the following:
Automation is necessary (or that not automating is foolish)
“Creating great content” is all that’s needed to succeed
Link building is easy
Link building is dead
That itâs simple. I guess there might be some styles of link building that might be deemed as âsimpleâ, but these days, you need links that will last. Those arenât so easy to achieve.
The ultimate question: what is an SEO’s favourite alcoholic drink?
The answer? Beer! Beer was mentioned by 10 interviewees (30%), followed by whisky, which was mentioned by 7 (21%). The fact that beer came first and IPAs were also mentioned confirms Emma Still’s suspicions that many of us SEOs are fond of our beer.
Red wine was favoured over white wine, plus there were mentions of gin & tonic and cocktails. And of course, let’s not forget Chris Dyson’s list…
I generally drink:
Mouthful of red wine
âLighter fluidâ
Double gin
Finger of cider (with ice)
Finger of cider (with ice)
Finger of cider (with ice)
Glass of sherry
Two big chugs of sherry
[30 other bullet-points containing alcoholic drinks]
I should point out that at the end of Peter Attia’s interview, Alessio had started to become worried that “SEOs seem to drink quite a lot when SEOing” – given Chris’ response, I’m not surprised!
What do you think about SEO community?
It’s tough to do a proper analysis on this one, too. Generally, the sentiment is positive, although a few people feel that the industry may be too nice insofar as it is not challenged enough.
Well ⌠itâs diverse. I really enjoy the passion and there are a number of people in the community who I respect and enjoy â even if I donât always agree with them.
I do get a bit frustrated at the rubber stamp part of the community. I wish weâd be more committed to testing things out ourselves instead of taking âexpertâ opinion (even my own) as gospel.
Iâd also like to see a higher level of intellectual honesty in evaluating whatâs really valuable within our industry regardless of who or where it was published. I want more quality, more authenticity and less âme tooâ.
An odd one to include perhaps, but I was curious to see if multiple SEOs asked themselves the same question. But as it turns out, every question was unique.
The majority of them were related to SEO, but a couple were general, including a few to do with music.
Here’s my favourite though… đ
Make yourself a question and give an answer:Â Do you have a crush in the industry?
(Sorry, canât think of any other question haha). Yeah, there are some that I do admire in the industry like Steph Chang of Distilled, Hanna Poferl, Lauren Litwinka of AimClear, and Joanna Lord of SEOmoz.
Our 33 interviewees mentioned a total of 94 people that they’ve considered an influence on them in terms of SEO. That’s nearly 3 influencers per interviewee, although it varied, with some interviewees only offering one (or not specifying anyone individually at all), right up to the likes of Jonathan Colman, who referenced a total of 19 people.
Of course, it’s not always necessarily our industry’s leaders who can be influential…
New link builders. Theyâre some of the most creative SEOâs I know. Some of the out of the box ideas Iâve heard from new talent has been quite incredible. When youâve been doing SEO for a while you start to get some tunnel thought. New folks still donât know what is and isnât doable, so they come up with some really clever concepts.
If you werenât an SEO, what would you like to do?
If Google were to collapse and SEO were to disappear tomorrow, we’d have:
5 writers/authors
3 chefs
3 musicians (one being a rock star)
2 teachers
Multiple brick-and-mortar property/shop owners
An astronaut
A fireman
A gardener
An assassin/hacker
One would catch up on sleep
One would eat pizza (ideally professionally)
And finally… 2 would be superheroes
When I was younger, I had aspirations to be a surf bum/counselor, hanging on the beach, surfing all day while âtalking with and inspiring thoughtsâ in others. Psychology, âthe why of people,â has always been a fascination of mine and was one of my college majors. In my shallowest moments, I thought about being the pool boy at the Playboy Mansion; but, those girls would probably just gawk at meâŚnot appreciating my beautiful insides⌠As Iâm getting older (33!  Man, wasnât I just reading Shakespeare during high school Math class a little while ago?), Iâm learning it all starts inside you. I just want to be someone better than the dude yesterday in the mirror each morningâŚI think the âwhatâ is not as important as the âwho.â
Lastly, in the spirit of the #seomusic hashtag and Alessio’s Now That’s What SEOs Call Music post, I just wanted to let you know that this post was brought to you by the following albums:
…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – Lost Songs
Bellowhead – Broadside
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Also, if anyone has any “who said that?” moments based on the above (where I haven’t specified a name) but you’re struggling to find out for yourself then please feel free to tweet me or leave a comment below and I’ll find out for you. I have some info saved in a spreadsheet – I’d share it publicly, but it’s in one heck of a messy, note-filled state!