Blatent Plug

The digital point forums are full of crazy people who can't read specs, the webmaster world ones full of crazy people with huge egos. However! There's a rather good SEO Forum starting up - http://forums.seohelp.org - run by experts who have maintained a free help service in their spare time over the past four years. Drop in!

BuyBlogComments.com review

BuyBlogComments.com is a service launched in July 2007 and run by Jon Waraas, where you can pay to have someone leave relevant blog comments on a bunch of blogs in your industry, with an anchor text and URL of your choosing. This gives a mild SEO benefit (despite most blog comments having rel=nofollow applied) and a bit of traffic toward your site. Many people hire freelancers from the likes of Rent-A-Coder or Get-A-Freelancer to do this kind of work; some call it black hat, though in my opinion, that's a little rude; black hat's often much cleverer.

I tried out this service, with the smallest package of 100 comments for $19.99.

When you apply, the post-purchase page says you'll be contacted within 12-24 hours. Now, I dived in there making a purchase shortly after the launch of the service; I'm not sure why, but it took about 4 days of hearing plain silence before I started being a little concerned, whereupon I emailed Jon, who reassured me that they hadn't forgotten my order, and was appropriately apologetic.

Lo and behold, a few more days later, a spreadsheet arrived with 100 URLs to blog comments. Fantastic, I thought; that was easy and quick!

So, I decided to review this list, to see how BuyBlogComments.com has done. I was a little disappointed by the details; a bit more attention to quality and thoroughness would've saved a few mistakes. I waited one week after receiving the URL list before checking it, to allow bloggers to approve comments.

One of the things that BuyBlogComments.com really pushed themselves on was the relevance of blog comments - "What BuyBlogComments.Com does is pay people to write quality blog comments on quality blogs" - though I found really generic comments, such as "dana: truly valuable post" (that's the entire comment! see mikes5starstore.typepad.com). The reporting was also really unclear in places; sometimes the links led to blank pages, or just the blog homepage - this is tough when there are a lot of posts. For example, I was given this link - see if you can guess which post the comment's on:

http://sheabutterblog.blogspot.com/ (shea butter)

The entire blog is about "shea butter", with hundreds of posts!
At other times, there would be a link to a blog that's utterly irrelevant. I tested the system out with a fashion/apparel themed site; I got left this comment. The topic's not relevant (mattresses are not fashionable, despite what your local bed retailer thinks!), the grammar's bad, the spelling's actually off - how people manage to misspell commercial copywriting these days is beyond me - and the comment itself has had no thought applied to it.

BuyBlogComments.com also suggests that "They are hand written by excellent english (sic) speaking people in America and Canada. We have a really great system here at Buy Blog Comments." That may be true; I don't see any claim to having native English speakers, which might explain the low rate. Of course that's not a problem until grammar and spelling mistakes appear, which they do. I'd much rather have a guarantee that comments will be syntactically correct than a guarantee of the location of the posters.

Another thing I noticed was that some comment URLs were actually duplicated within the list. That's right, I only received 97 unique URLs. I contacted Jon about this (as well as a few other mistakes) and he didn't provide any kind of answer or compensation.

Anyway, my biggest problem was that 33 of the 97 comments simply were not there. There's a bit on the legal part of the Buyblogcomments.com site, which Jon kindly referred me to, that says they only guarantee the posting of comments, and not their approval. Doesn't this sound like a loophole to allow them to just give you 100 blog post URLs sans comment and say "well, we submitted one!"? I'm quite stunned at the failure rate and how badly blogs were chosen; some were obviously dead/slow blogs that were pointless to comment. A paid service should, at the very least, review these factors before commenting, to ensure a successful comment approval:

1. Comment should contribute to the post
2. Post should have been made within the past week
3. Other comments on other posts should have been approved recently
4. Post shouldn't say "I am going on holiday for a while"
5. Comment should be grammatically correct and well-spelled
6. Post should already have some approved comments

There were definite cases where one or more of these suggestions had been completely ignored. I voiced my opinions to Jon, and after hearing nothing for a week, kindly prodded him; he referred me to their legal page with reference to unapproved comments, and offered nothing more in the case of duplicate / irrelevant comments.

Type	Quantity	Comments
Dupes	3	Where one comment's URL has been listed twice as a "successful" comment
No URL	1	Comments where there's no link
No comment	28	Comment has not been approved / never submitted
Not relevant	3	Comments on irrelevant posts / blogs
OK	56	Successfully placed comments
Blank page	1	The comment URL goes to a blank page - broken site?
Ambiguous URL	8	Couldn't find the comment, URL was given to a large and busy blog instead of the individual post

I haven't reported on really short comments that bore no relevance; there were too many to account for, and BuyBlogComments.com already seemed to be doing so badly that I gave up trying to get this point corrected. They make up about 30%-40% of the comments that actually got published.

As for results: the site that was used for testing had an unusually great day for sales when the report arrived, easily making back the outlay on comments. However, we've seen less that 20 clicks to date from all the blog comments in total, over a four week period from placing the order. I'm not sure if the sales have any link to the comments; the referral URLs were from natural search and Wikipedia. There has been a small but noticeable boost for the term used for the blog comments, so that's a mild plus in favour of the service, too.

So, in summary;

Pros

• Saves getting ones hands dirty with a freelancer
• Delivery in under ten days
• Cordial and professional support
• Was cheap ($19.99 for "100" comments)
• Possibly great for short term sales
• Some SEO benefit
• Site is easy to use

Cons

• Almost 50% failure rate (only 56 out of 100 comments ever made it)
• Comments are badly written (grammar and spelling mistakes)
• Comments are often not relevant ("great post!" - a bot could apply this kind of content at a much lower rate; we're paying to avoid such a low quality level)
• Not always applied to relevant blogs
• Contact can be slow (took over a week from payment to delivery)
• Some duplicate reporting means you won't even get as many comment submissions as you pay for(only 97 unique URLs were in my report, when there should've been 100)
• Price has gone up ($24.99 for "100" comments; with the same success rate as I had, that's 45 cents a comment.)
• Next to no traffic (would you click through to see the site behind comments this inconsequential?)

I won't be returning; the yield simply isn't high enough, and quality's not as expected.

Optimaliser.no

Poor old Netty - they sell undertøy (lingerie / underwear). Scroll to the bottom of their front page; see a weird thing in the bottom right? Let your mouse cursor hover over it. Their "SEO" company has placed links to all their other clients on the frontpage! I say, sue the buggers. Don't use Optimaliser.no! They're selfish scum, abusing their clients. See video below for the full insult they've levied on their unfortunate customers.



If you don't get it, they've placed links on client's homepages that detract from the client's optimal setup, instead helping Optimaliser.no's business.

SEO Theory

SEO Theory is run by a man who actually knows what he's talking about, instead of someone who loiters in forums and regurgitates hype. The latter forms around 90% of SEO blogs that I've found. There are plenty of published, authoritative resources around that Actually Tell You How Search Engines Work. There's no mystery there, and Michael Martinez is rather keen to rub this point in, with a little bile if neccessary. You'll even find long debunkings, exhaustive explanations, and guides on how to do things properly, which saves me having to type all this stuff. You might even find something related to (shock horror) actual proper Internet Marketing there. Go Michael! Now read his blog, you lucky, lucky people.

Rankmoron

Take a look at this atrocity of a site - Rankmon.

What on earth is it? It looks like a three listings of sites that have a search function, ranked by some completely arbitrary system (which are apparently not at all privy to), allowing us to determine things like "top organic search sites". Yahoo! and Google must be pretty disappointed at their placings of 4th and 8th, despite being specialists in organic search for the past decade. It must be degrading indeed to have put all this effort in, and still be ranked lower than Tripadvisor or eBay as an organic search engine.

However, I think their pain must pale in comparison to the top dog - Wikipedia, with their number one spot; what was it that guy from Wikipedia said? "... its readers regard Wikipedia as a search engine. It probably comes as no surprise that my spine stiffens at that concept ...".

Further, we have this spurious "growth" statistic. What on earth does it mean? No idea, it's not explained! Perhaps we gan guess by sorting the list by "growth" - ah no, the site operators were too lazy to code that. Or even run the thing through a spell checker, for that matter.

On pane two, "Fastest growing organic search sites in world", we have even greater delights. This is the part where we find out who's going to blow Google's search back into the 20th Century. Who's number 6 on the list?



Plumbingsupply.com! Who'd have thought it! Google, you better watch out. (Yes, I know it's for visibility, but just look at the page title..)

We can even dig deeper; try clicking on any of the sites you see, and you'll see where they rank for what keywords, and how important this is considered.

http://www.rankmon.com/site/index/dressupgirl.net

For example, dressupgirl.net's number 1 contributor to its high place on Rankmoron is "second for girls games in MSN Live". Wow, amazing! Second place! Looking down the list, we can see other lesser achievements. What's this one I see? "first for girl games in Google". Well, that's pretty good, but obviously not as good as being Second (oh yeah!) for such a popular, prestigious and market-share hogging engine as MSN Live Search. How on earth could you reach such an awful conclusion, and publish on the web? I hope this stuff's still in beta, or alpha, or being coded in notepad between classes..

Woah there, though. Maybe a went a bit far. I think I can see a potentially useful tool here - "Competitors"! Let's take a look, and see who else is competing for little girl's dress up games. Perhaps if we can nail these guys, dressupgirl.net can rocket all the way to number 1. On MSN. So who's there?

http://www.rankmon.com/site/competitors/dressupgirl.net

Oh man, they're screwed! Wikipedia, Amazon, About.com, Yahoo!, NeXTaG, eBay. I suppose none of those guys are dedicated sources to dressing up games, and certainly should be easy to knock out of the water. But wait just a god damned minute - haven't we seen this list before?

BS exhibit (a)

So, congrats Rankmon. Your algorithm sucks.