Blog Honeypotting – Using Comment Spam to Your Advantage

Many of us internet marketers like to create multiple blogs either to promote our money sites or add content to an existing site. This allows us to create pages of relevant search engine “spider food” as well as get a community involved around our store. Nothing is better than having tons of user generated content in the form of topic replies and comments. Unfortunately many of the comments will be spam, submitted in an effort to get a backlink from your site. Most store owners see this as a hassle, I WELCOME it… here’s why!

I must say right off the bat that the marketing method I’m about to show you requires a few prerequisites. One, your honeypot blog really needs to have page rank, usually a PR 2 or better. Two, there is a manual way to do this process but it would be very time consuming so I’m going to recommend you have some sort of backlink analyzing tool – I use Market Samurai for this. Ok, let’s get started.

The premise behind this idea is simple. I want to make it easy for blog comment spammers to find, and post a comment (to be held in moderation) to my blog. Why the hell would I want to do that? Simple, I want to take advantage of all their hard work finding high PR blogs to post to.

You see, most GOOD blog spammers comment in mass and have spent time “harvesting” high PR target sites to comment on. So by “honeypotting” your own site, we can now copy the URL that they are promoting and reverse engineer its links; this is where Market Samurai comes in.

The Process: Copy the URL that the commenter left on your site. Open Market Samurai (or your preferred backlink analyzing tool) and start a new project; any keyword will do to start the project. Now go to the SEO Competition tab. In the bottom right click the “Add Custom URLs” button. Paste the DOMAIN of the URL. The URL should now appear in your list. To the right of the URL column there is a small blue arrow that you can click and it will reveal a few options. Click on the PR Analysis button on the left. This analysis will run a check on all the links pointing back to that domain and show you what the PR of each backlink page is. Eureeka! You can now see a good many of the sites this person is using to get backlinks from along with the PR of each. Export the list and go to town on it!

You can employ this method on any high PR blogs your own, or you could use it on High PR forums as well. In a month you could quickly amass a huge list of sites to reverse engineer the links on.

And here’s a final thought. Once you extract the links from these URLs, keep a list of all the high PR sites to use whenever you need them for marketing a new project. Simply provide the list to an outsourcer and pay them to leave semi-intelligent comments. Cha-ching!


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