Under attack by the Gray Hat SEO agents?
Well, we know white hat, and we know black hat. To make our grounds clear, white hat, in my own form of rating means legal and ethical, black hat means legal/illegal but definitely unethical. So what does gray hat mean? Definitely legal, but can sway within the ethical grounds. For an instance, if I do gray hat SEOing(Search Engine Optimizing), I might not back down since I know it’s legal, but I my self wouldn’t know whether it’s ethical or not.
Have you ever had those random commentators that go through a bunch of your old posts and comment to get on top of your “Top Commentators” list, and have a nice bunch of keywords as their anchor texts? Yeah.. Those are the people. Commentators that quote a part of your post itself to make the comment worthwhile and leave a zillion of them at random posts, knowing that your blog is do-follow? That’s them.
Alright! So, the real question is, “Is it ethical?”. I mean, they are not doing anything illegal. They are just contributing to your blog by creating much needed content. And, it’s not illegal to comment on your old posts, even though their prime objective is to get on top of the top commentators list.
What they are doing is definitely not black. And I can’t say it’s white. Then again, if you have a do-follow blog or a “Top Commentators” list, it just means that you’re readily bribing the those SEO-holics to do their thing right? So in a way, you might not like the smoke, but you definitely put some hay there because you like the fire.
So as a final word, I used to think that these people were ruining the quality of the blogosphere and slowing down the growth of it. And many of us still think so. Then I realized how wonderful they are than the jerks who use comment-kahuna to leave 1,349 automated “Nice Post!” comments on my blog. You’re willing to give them some juice for their comment, so as long as it’s not spam, “write the check and be happy about it”.
Of course, you can try applying no-follow tags to all your external links. But then, even white hats won’t bother to comment on your blog! SO, how do you handle these gray hats?
If you approve all your comments manually you can get rid of those GRAY HAT SEOs. Usually the white hat SEOs post comments with their real names. Do not approve comments of those people who are adding KEYWORDS in the name area.
Yeah! You’re absolutely right!
Deleting everyone who just uses a keyword for the name is a handy way of dealing with the problem but I often find that they’ve taken the time to write an actual response to my post. Or, at least, done a good job faking it. I used to feel slightly bad about deleting the less spammy responses.
Last week I cut through the whole mess and instigated a comments policy with “No keywords” as one of the rules. If they take the time to write a decent-looking comment as “Bob from Nappy Store” then I’m happy to let it stand. If they use the Name field for just Nappy Store, it’s gone.