Grey-hat SEO Techniques
Not all SEO techniques are good - not all are bad; somewhere in between lies grey-hat techniques. These are those tried and tested ‘tricks’ which are not not altogether unethical, but which are definitely open to abuse and nearly invariably are abused.
Let us talk about Blogs and the SEO angle. It is fine to leave comments on blogs with a link back to your site, but how many people really do that? What I mean is how many people leave informative, useful comments and how many leave spam disguised as a comment. The SEO benefits of backlinks are well-known, as is the easy availability of such links from the multitude of blogs out there. However, I consider this at best a grey-hat SEO technique. Most likely it is heading towards a black-hat trick which may be penalised by the search engines eventually (or the link value downgraded). How they might identify such meaningless comments on blogs is anybody’s guess.
Most blog owners know how to filter the spam, but with scripts hunting the net for suitable hosts to accommodate their parasitic backlinks, it is becoming an epidemic that is turning into a real pain to control. Are webmasters so desperate to avoid white-hat SEO and valuable unique content that they need to resort to spamming their peers? I know blog links count for something in terms of SEO value, but it is such a shame to open my blog everyday and first have to sift through the auto-generated comments in my ‘moderate’ list, looking to pick out the ‘real’ comments.
Let us hope Google will continue to improve it’s algorithm and weed out those who try to manipulate it in such a way as to annoy everyone else. White-hat SEO is the only way to optimise your site and anything else will hopefully eventually be deemed worthless.