Another stupid SEO strategy: the filipino link builder who can’t write

I went over to that blog to check it out (something I will usually
do if you leave me a comment), and something was immediately obvious to
me: this is a caucasian male who clearly has a good command of the
English language, and (from the Contact page) lives in Ontario, Canada.
So it seemed immediately strange to me that his comment on my blog post
was written in broken, second-rate English.

What you can’t see from the front-end of my blog is what my admin page tells me: that the IP address of this commenter is 58.69.208.247. I do an RDNS lookup, a traceroute, a geo-ip lookup and all that jazz and come up with the confident fact that the commenter is in the Philippines! What the?!

So I asks myself the scary question, I does…

What would motivate this filipino dude to come to my site and post a comment on behalf of a guy in Canada?

Well you know, I just couldn’t come up with an answer that made any real sense, that didn’t to a degree incriminate Mr Stu McLaren (the Ontario Idea Guy). I also couldn’t get the search engines or (Technorati)
to show me if my site was “hit” as part of a broader
linking campaign that some guy in the Philippines was doing on
Stu’s behalf. But I’m still really sus.

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong per se to get
someone to “ghost-write” harmless blog post comments all
over the place. Lame, but perhaps not wrong. Heck, outsourced
link-building campaigns are the backbone of SEO, and in that world this
kind of proxy commenting would be seen as a lighter-shade of grey(hat),
at most.

But hey… at the very least try to get it done to a standard where it’s not immediately obvious
that it’s someone else and not you! Secondly, make sure
you’re not paying more than a few cents per link for this
“service” because blog comments are the lowest of the low
hanging fruit, for a couple of reasons:

1. For a start, the search engines and directories (like Technorati)
   don’t count the URL/link under the comment author’s name
   for much. Only links in the body of the post count for anything worth
   the trouble.
2. To add insult to injury, many (but definitely not all) blogs these
   days attach a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the A tag of the
   link to the commenter’s website/blog, rendering it of no value in
   a link-building campaign. No value for any keywords that matter to you,
   anyway.

I don’t know why anyone would want to hand real money over to a filipino link-builder who didn’t understand those two points!

So, if you’re going to hand money over the table for a
link-building campaign, here are some quick — hopefully helpful
— tips: