The Greatest Comment Spammer. Ever.
Deleting comment spam from time to time is part of owning a blog, but Check City’s comment spam is so unbelievably prolific, it boggles my mind. This post isn’t to call out a competitor, but it’s so out of hand, I have to say it. For anyone who is not familiar with what comment spam is, basically it’s leaving a useless comment on a blog like “good post” in the hopes of gaining link back to your site in hopes of improving your ranking in Google.
Leaves a bad taste in your mouth
How Bad Is It?
It’s not just this blog, it’s every blog that exists and is no longer active. They have pending comments on blogs that don’t even exist yet. There are actually more Checkcity.com payday loan blog comments than there are blogs. How is this even possible? Because they leave multiple comments for each blog. Stop being ridiculous you say? Okay, here’s numerous comments in a single blog. Oh yeah, the blog is completely in Vietnamese, but the comments are in English, because that’s useful.
It’s getting to the point where high school students are going to see it on their SAT exam.
“Sand is to beach, as Checkcity is to ______________”
A. developing original names
B. helpful information
C. comment spam
D. useless information
The answer, of course, is C. It always is.
Intern Army
How do they find the time to have their comments so widespread? Because they hire peope who can barely read to scour the internet and leave comments on every blog they can find. I actually saw one blog where the person actually wrote: “Hi, I think payday loans are good, because I work for a payday loan company. My boss wants me to go on the internet and leave messages on websites.”
I imagine that the Check City blog department looks something like this:
Check City Comment Department
Broken Blog
Why don’t people go to the Check City blog to leave comments in return, to tell them that they’re tired of seeing their useless comments that don’t contribute ideas or useful information? Because their blog is broken. They could fix it, but all their employees are too busy posting comments on other people’s blogs to fix their own.
What is rel=“nofollow”?
I’m pretty sure Check City’s asking the same question. It’s what prevents page rank from being passed on to sites you don’t intend to. 90% of all blogs include this tag in website links left in blog comments. It’s not surprising then, that at the time of this post, Check City has 1,193 incoming links. 983 of which do not pass any page rank. Source: LinkDiagnosis.com
Check City Useless Links Ratio
Save yourself some time Check City, before leaving a comment on a blog, click View > Source Code. If the links have the nofollow tag in their comments section, it’s not helping you.
Final Thoughts
I bet anyone $20 that checkcity leaves a spammy comment on this actual post. If you want to take that bet, simply leave a comment and I will email you with my address so you can mail me my check.
Tags: check city, checkcity, comment spam, payday loan, payday spam
March 25th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
Well, well, well, someone jealous of our blogging army? I can’t begin to tell you how many things are wrong with your post, but I’ll give it my best shot.
First, your definition of comment spam is actually correct. Any comment that does nothing to contribute to the content of the blog. Let’s take a look at some of the comments already on your post:
“There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also.
“thanks !! very helpful post!”
“You made some good points there. I did a search on the topic and found most people will agree with your blog.”
Ask yourself something now…could these comments appear on any other blog and make sense? The answer is a resounding YES! That’s called comment spam, and for being so staunchly against it, I am quite surprised you allow it on your blog.
Secondly, did you look at your Korean blog example? The comments with any Check City link are….in Korean! Congratulations on that.
Now the question here is this: would you consider this comment spammy? Is the simple act of leaving a comment with a link to Check City instantly make the comment spam, regardless of what is being said in the comment?
So do you owe me $20 because a Check City “spammer” left a non-spam comment on your blog? Please proceed to CheckCity.com and borrow $100 for a little while, I feel that is an adequate way to pay me the $20 owed for this non-spammy comment.
Can I ask you something too? If you are so against comments on blogs for links, why is the first link in your total from a comment on a blog? Just a bit hypocritical, no? Oh wait, your comment wasn’t “spam” because it said more than “nice post.” So how about the hundreds of Check City links on blog comments where the comments are not spam?
All I know is Check City ranks on the second page of “payday loans” on Google, so you may want to rethink your term “army of spammers” to ” army of linkbuilders.” And if you feel link building is a spammy practice, I suggest you stop commenting on blogs as well.