Do Sploggers Hurt Your SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

You’ve seen them. They’re usually hosted on one of the free blogging services: Blogspot, WordPress.com, Lifelogger, or one of the thousands of other free blog hosts. You visit the page and there’s nothing more than a couple of sentences of text followed by a hyperlink – a link to a blog post on your blog. The text might read something like this:

“I found an interesting article today on XXXXXX. To read it click here.”

Of course, the “click here” will be the link to your blog post. Does this hurt you?

Aside from the fact that the “click here” being used as anchor text, I see no real SEO benefit from this link. Obviously, if instead of saying “click here,” the blogger used keywords related to your post then that might fare better for you as far as SEO is concerned. But what about coming from a free blog host that shows no indication of being relevant to your website at all?

I’d say it probably doesn’t hurt you. The search engines know there is spam out there and you can’t do anything about someone linking to your site. You can control outbound links, but inbound links you have no control over, so they do consider that. However, I’d imagine that Google, since it owns Blogger, probably doesn’t look at this free blog host the same as it would others, which means that inbound links from a Blogger blog might actually help you in an SEO sense.

The real purpose of these blogs is for the person who manages them to place ads on them and reap some kind of revenue from your content. Sleazy? Perhaps. Lazy? Of course. Unethical? Sure. But since it doesn’t really hurt you then why cry about it? You are getting an attribution link despite the person’s motives.

Most of the free blog services allow you to flag or report their users for spam. You can do that if you wish. But I’d say as long as you’re getting the attribution link then don’t bother. It’s when they don’t link back to you that you need to be worried.