It's called
SPAM.
Spam is the internet equivalent of
vandalism.
Think about it. Suppose you have a blog about fish, a topic you really care about, and you want to have meaningful conversations with other people about that topic. You've spent a lot of time writing your content, but when you publish it, the only comments that are made don't have anything to do with fish and instead contain a bunch of links to some other financial planning or Viagra websites.
Do the people that left the comments care about fish?
No. Are those comments contributing anything of value?
No. As the blog owner, do you want those comments on your blog?
No.
When and if you leave comments on someone else's website, especially when you share a link to another website, make sure that the comment and the linked website is useful or contributes to the discussion in some way. You can go off-topic if it fits the flow of the conversation. You can be humorous. You can ask questions. You can link to useful or interesting resources that you think others might be interested in, as long as it is appropriate. None of those things are wrong. In fact, they're a sign of a healthy community.
However, useless forum postings just for signature links, posting comments on blogs that don't add a no-follow attribute on outgoing links (technically there is no such thing as a 'do-follow' blog), or submitting every page of your site to every social site you can find are just forms of spam.
It's important to consider the ethics of how you conduct your search engine and marketing strategies. Just because something isn't blackhat doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
Some things to consider when leaving a link to your site on someone else's site or submitting it to social media are:
- Am I doing this just for a backlink?
- Will this contribute to the site or article or topic's purpose in some way?
- Do I have any intention of coming back to this site and participating further in a constructive way?
- How would I view this comment or submission if I were the site's owner?
What's more, trying to get billions of backlinks doesn't accomplish anything except wasting your time. In fact, if you want to have a sustainable company, spamming will actually hurt you over time because you won't be able to maintain a good reputation.
If you want the real secret of how to get billions of links to your website, it's this:
Have other people do it for you. How do you do that? By creating content or a service that is worth linking to in the first place. A referral by a trusted blogger is worth far more than spammy links in a blog comment.
Does that mean that all you have to do is build it and they will come? No, you will still have to do some marketing at some point, but if you build it well, the marketing will be more effective and you will get higher returns for less marketing effort because people will see real value in what you've built.
You can also gain trust in social sites by actively participating over the long term. And guess what? If you build trust in communities and have something worth visiting, reading, using, or buying; people will start linking to it, which will bring more people, which will bring more links...for those of you so concerned about search engines, this isn't a bad thing.
About those search engines, though...they need to be put in the proper perspective. Being on the first page of a search is great, but if people leave your site right away, it's not so good. So many people get so caught up in SEO and PageRank, but what is the point of your website?
In some way, shape, or form, you are looking for a conversion. You want to gain a regular reader, a user, a promoter, or a buyer. Your bottom line is your conversion rate and you want to improve it. How do you do that? Testing and experimentation over time. Install Google Analytics or some other tracking service and see what happens over the course of several weeks. Then change something and wait a few more weeks. If your conversion rate is better, then keep the change. If not, then revert it and try something else.
What's the point of all this? I'm just trying to get people to think a little bit differently about how they go about promoting their websites. There isn't an easy way. There are no shortcuts. However, there are better ways of doing things. Concentrate on the things that are going to be the best use of your time and that are going to maximize your conversion rates.
