If there is one thing I hate more than anything else about blogging it is dealing with comment spam. I have taken a few tips and tried out Spam Karma 2, but until consulting for a small website recently I did not realize how bad blog spam can be for the company doing it.

Here is the scenario - we got a new client who had an SEO previously who did a bunch of comment spam. Interestingly enough it seemed to help them a bit in msn and yahoo, but their listings are nowhere to be found in google. So I talked to Matt Cutts at a recent tradeshow and he verified that they did have an algorithmic penalty due to some “questionable backlinks.”

I did more investigation to figure out how to overcome this penalty (I’ve never dealt with this issue before because I never spam) and I basically found out I had 2 options:

1) Go ask all of the bloggers who have been spammed to remove the spammy links (not realistic)

2) Build a bunch more clean links and essentially overpower the spam links (still a lot more work but much more realistic)

It has been quite a good learning experience for me - I’m not sure whether it makes sense to keeping working on this client’s account or not but I did learn just how detrimental push-button SEO can be.