Techcrunch Helping Website Rank #1 For “Cheap Viagra” In Google?

While I was doing a bit of research and trying to analyze why some sites are ranking high for very competitive search terms…

… I ran across a site that is currently ranking #1 in Goolge for the search term "Cheap Viagra " .

While digging through some of their inbound links I quickly found that a very popular tech website is actually helping them rank #1 because the link spammers pushing this site up to the top slipped a link into one of the Techcrunch web pages.

The Techcrunch post dates back to the summer of 2006… and this link spam was made in early 2007 and blatantly includes 2 links back to their website. (the bottom comment).

(t looks like comments are closed on that post now (as far as I can tell)… but I wonder why Techcrunch hasn’t taken it down yet.  It’s probably that they get so many comments on posts they might not manually moderate comments anymore… but instead use spam filters to do the bulk of the work (this is just a guess though… )

Anyhow, this is a good lesson to put the term "viagra" in your Askimet spam filter.

So… technically… without knowing it … Techcrunch has helped this site get to the top of a huge money term and I’m sure rake in thousands of sales each and every day (Clarification… Techcrunch isn’t raking in thousands from this, the Viagra site owner is).

Just to be clear, I don’t write this post to implicate Techcrunch on anything or insinuate that they even know about this comment on their site… I’m positive they probably don’t have a clue the comment is even on their site.  It just goes to show that ANY website can let spam comments slip through… and we all need to be sure to monitor the comments we approve to keep our company image and professionalism intact.  You never know if a comment like this could turn off prospect reading your website… and cost you real dollars.

Is blog commenting still working for SEO?

Yep… sure is…

Just ask the comment spammers behind the "Cheap Viagra" Google leaders.  Pretty much every inbound link I found going to their site is from comment spam… but not in a way that is blatant URL stuffed generic spam that we all see in our Askimet spam folders everyday.

It seems that a lot of the comments left on blogs from this URL do somewhat reference the post and/or the blog writers name… so they aren’t overtly spammy.  So, I guess you can call this spamming with a personal touch .

Seems to work (but I wouldn’t be able to tell you from first hand experience .