I’m often asked about ‘Black Hat SEO’, the use of underhanded tactics to gain higher rankings than deserved. A good example would be Buy Blog Comments, who promote a new service offering to leave comment spam on blogs for those wanting to increase SEO rankings. Buy Blog Comments offers to leave spam comments at a rate of 100 comments for $19.99, 500 comments for $99.99 and 1,000 comments for $199.99.

On their website their service is described as follows:

Blog comments help your site rank better in the SERPs. We hired a few people who go through a list of blogs in a database we set up and pick out blogs that are in your niche. They then read through blog posts and leave a comment that has to do with the blog post they read, that way it wont get deleted. Your backlink will then be on a targeted blog, giving you more weight in the search engines.

I believe this will hurt legitimate bloggers who rely on a hard-won readership that comments on their blogs. Carried to the levels Buy Blog Comments intends to take this could cause Google to place considerably less weight on comments in their algorithms, and that will hurt the entire blogging community. Many CMS sites, not generally grouped with blogs, but where commenting is an option (Joomla!, Mambo, Typo 3, etc.), are likely to be painted with the same brush in that event.

True, some comment spammers have profited from the practice, but in most cases that I’ve heard about they don’t just leave a few hundred comment spams, they leave tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of them. Fortunately, Akismet and the use of no follow tags in the comments sections helps curb the practice. I think it’s time bloggers take a stand against such blatant attacks and begin adding spammers to the Akismet blacklist.

Your thoughts?