I am relatively new to the world of blogging, and I made a promise to myself to share much of what I learn in this world of blogging. Now that we have our first comment spam, I figured it would be a great idea to share my knowledge about comment spam.

Comment Spam: Anyone up for some Final Fantasy Football?

It is easy to identify spam comments because they typically have the following elements:

• It is completely off-topic from the blog post.
  Before this post, our blog had no mentions of Fantasy Football or Final Fantasy.
• It has a lot of keywords that are obviously stuffed into the comment.
  As you can see, there are a bunch of keywords in this comment. They are stuffed into a grammatically-incorrect statement. And they are separated by commas.
• All of the keywords are off-topic from the blog post.
  Again, none of the keywords in this comment relate to the blog post.
• It has a link in the comment.
  This is the tell-tale sign of comment spam: links. Comment spammers use these links to influence search engine rankings. And some comment spammers even use these links as a traffic source.
• It has a link in the name.
  Why stop with links in the body of the comment when you can also link the name field in the comment?
• The email domain is suspicious.
  In this case, the comment was obviously a spam comment. I didn’t even really need to investigate the email address. But the email address can be an indicator of spam comments. For this comment, the email is from yandex.ru, the most popular search engine in Russia. It’s like the Yahoo of Russia. Anyone can get a yandex.ru mail account, so this email is not completely suspicious. However, I have seen comments from info@gmail.com, and that is definitely a fake email address.
  

Now you know about Comment Spam. It’s purpose is to generate links, higher rankings for keywords, and traffic from our blog. The bad news is that people still use this technique for link building. And even worse, they only do it because it works. It’s definitely not something we do or recommend to our clients. Anyways, the point of this blog post is to teach you what to look for. Mission accomplished. Right?

• Keyword: (random 7-term keyword)
• Impressions: 1
• Clicks: 1
• Cost: $.25
• Conversions: 1
• Revenue: $1,256.37
• ROI: Hahahahahaha

It may be the only impression that particular keyword gets for the next 6 months. But if you can create a campaign that reaches out effectively enough to reach customers looking for very specific things, these one-click wonders can easily leverage investment in wider ranges of nonbrand keywords – i.e. make you look super smart.

With a solid SEO program and smart keyword selection, you can accomplish the same thing – only exponentially larger, given the volume of clicks that natural results drive versus paid ones. All it takes is a readable site and the time, patience and courage to see it through (though having an award-winning SEO department at your back can really help), via opportunities like:

• Taking your meta data beyond single-word targets based on what you’ve named your categories or products
• Taking your product names and descriptions beyond what your branding team or manufacturers provide you
• Taking your internal linking beyond a three-clicks-to-a-product mentality and finding ways to get engines from your most authoritative pages to your most valuable content faster

Combining these efforts will open up your site to the ability to rank for a much wider range of keywords, in much the same way that a six-digit keyword buildout can, with much the same effect – only without those pesky click costs!

As brand owners, we wouldn’t think about putting our brand alongside something with a negative connotation, but in PPC, it happens every day. In fact, you could argue that it’s impossible to avoid completely. However, paid search mismatches can be greatly reduced with a few basic strategies every agency should be implementing.

Broad Match and Search Query Reports:

What broad match means for those of you who are unfamiliar with the lingo is that your search query will match to “similar phrases and relevant variations”. For example bidding on “chips” on broad match will allow you to show up for terms such as“Paint chips”, “potato chips”, “poker chips” and “chips TV series”. Extended broad match in Google will further allow you to show up for things like “Erik Estrada”. As you can see it can be very dangerous to bid solely on broad match, especially without an extensive list of negatives and other match types to support it.

Solution: Google gives you the ability to run Search Query Reports which show you the exact queries you are matching to. If we pulled one for a paint brand, we would see things like “eating” in the search query report and know we needed to add it as a negative keyword. Think of a negative keyword as the opposite of a keyword. It’s something you don’t want to show up for, like a C-SPAN fan club meeting or a really awkward party. Negative broad matching of the word “eating” would ensure that you won’t show up for any search query that contains the word “eating.”

Utilize exact match once you have narrowed the keywords you want to show up for. Exact matching will allow you to show for EXACTLY what the search query type in is. So, if you want to show up for “Paint Chips” you will not show up for anything that contains other search variations such as “eating paint chips”. This will not only make sure you are targeting your creative correctly, but it will also often result in a lower CPC and a higher conversion rate. Obviously, people searching for “eating paint chips” are either looking up movie quotes from Tommy Boy or the phone number for the poison control center.

Brand Image:

While it’s costly to inadvertently appear for terms you don’t want to be associated with, there are farther-reaching implications. When someone is searching for “eating paint chips” and your handcrafted kettle chip brand appears, what do you think that consumers are going to think or associate with your brand?

If you work with an agency ask them about this. If you don’t, make sure this is part of your strategy.

The first question that we got when word of this first came out – much like at the time of the launch of Wolfram Alpha, Cuil and every other media-dubbed Next Big Thing – was ‘how does this change my SEO?’. And it’s a fair question – MSN added new functions and are clearly testing others, and there had been talk of integrating behavioral information into results so that if you looked for ‘fish’ it would know whether you were looking for a restaurant or a rod and reel. Google sneezes and everyone’s rankings change, so what happens when it’s changing – dun dun DUUUUUH – names?

The answer to what Bing will change about how you approach SEO – much like most every other great leap forward in organic search – is nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

No matter what changes are brought to bear by Google, Yahoo and the rest of the bunch, SEO at its core is about three things: Is your content readable, are you pursuing the right keywords and are engines getting maximum value from your site – and until your content doesn’t matter anymore, your SEO strategy should be the same.

That’s not to say that search engines won’t expand their ability to read content, that new keyword sets won’t become important and that there won’t be new ways to put your site’s best foot forward. On this last point, there have been a lot of new opportunities created by Bing and especially by Google to improve both your search positioning and the way that your results appear in search engines. A good SEO team should be working with you on things like applying microformats to your pages and other new opportunities that have arisen with the engines’ newest toys.

Still, these opportunities won’t matter much if engines can’t see your site in the first place, or if you’re trying to sell shoes from a page without the word ‘shoes’ on it. These issues will make up the vast majority of how well you appear in search engines, and have been since the days when dinosaur’s roamed the earth and Google was a twinkle in Larry Page’s eye.

In essence, if you want to be ready for the next big Bing, make sure you’re ready for MSN first and see if that doesn’t take care of most of it.