By the way, you’ve now told me enough about your SEO company to convince me that they fit my personal definition of “black hat” or unethical SEO — as you’re already aware, the advice they were giving you was very hinky.

Thanks for the heads up on this Violet, I’ll keep a check on my queue.

I generally hate it when anybody, company or not, uses anchor text linking within their comment. I’ve even seen bloggers do it, and I won’t allow that. Your site link is in the comment field, that’s quite enough.

Is it bad though that I’m getting suspicious of commenters without blogs/sites? Like if I approve them once, then their name & email is on the allowed-list and the next time they comment they will get in, even if they add in a site to the comment form. I’ve had that happen as well. Someone I thought was a valid commenter turned out to be just getting his foot in the door for the SEO spam comments he somehow thought I’d be dumb enough to let fly.

By which I mean, super hot post! Come find more hot steamy lesbian action at my website! [Barely legal anal titties creampie Bikini girls]

First of all, if your relationship with my site is good enough, your leeway goes way up. If you’re a regular commenter and your comments are valued, I’m less likely to begrudge whatever marketing you do in the Name/Website boxes of the comment form.

As a first time commenter, a post under your company name will be viewed with suspicion, because companies are not humans and companies do not talk. Now, if the post is about your company or about a topic that’s near-and-dear to your company’s business interests, and you come to post in an official capacity for your company, then sure, a link to your company in the Name/Website boxes would be appropriate.

My problem is, I’m always seeing comments (typically short/weak comments, but not always) that seem to being left for the sole purpose of justifying a commercial link. So, if a link appears to have a commercial flavor, it causes me to doubt whether the comment itself should be allowed through moderation. Is this comment real, or was it left simply to support the spam link? Remove the commercial link, and the doubt goes away as well.

If your comment is sufficiently long, strong, or engaged with the post topic, you can probably worry about it rather less. But even so, if you’ve commented in a human voice, why not sign it with a human identity, rather than attribute it to a lifeless entity?

Fortunately, this doesn’t actually come up all that often. People who are into spamming their commercial links typically cannot resist the temptation to try and use keywords in the name field, as what the SEO types call “anchor text”. And I don’t care how beautiful and engaged the comment is, if it’s left by a first time commenter calling herself “Sex Toy”, I’m not going to approve it.