Ah, nice to see some justice done.

If you scroll down a bit on the blog, you'll see me complaining about three different blogspammers - but if you follow the links today, you'll notice that two of them are gone from the system.

Now, I don't for a moment think that means the end of blogspam - quite the opposite. But it does provide an explanation for the usernames - benpeterson7768, benpeterson7769, and so on. I don't think the removal of the automated blogspammer's accounts one by one is the ultimate solution to the problem, but it's still nice to see that the company is paying attention and doing something about it.

Now - if I was working on the system, I'd definitely be experimenting with ways to autodetect and remove the accounts used to game the system in this way.

And of course the blogspammers would be working on a way to create - say 24 different blogs, and updating each every half-hour in a random rotating fashion so that there would always be a fresh inbound link for the spiders to find.

24 is probably a low number, given the lengths people will go to to get to that prize - the hypercompetitive keywords can cost you up to $100K a year in SEO work just to stay within the top 20 or so.

Or so the SEO experts claim - I wouldn't know, it's not what I do, but I think I'll take their word for it.

So the question becomes - what kind of linking strategy can you pursue that won't cost you more than you'll make when you try to monetize your traffic?

One solution that several people have had some good results from is the press release strategy - if you do it well, you can have several hundred one-way incoming links that'll both drive traffic from the news item when publishers pick up on it and will be mighty tasty spider food.

Dual advantage for you, of course.

Which is nice if you're a merchant or you're selling your own product and you manage to tie your own product(s) in with something newsworthy - but I don't see how that strategy can work for an affiliate marketer. A press release about you joining LinkShare.com as an affiliate for a (not-so)random example won't have half the impact that a press release about the new Overstock.com Auctions! for another (not-so) random example had.

But there's an alternative to press releases - article writing. If you're good enough to get picked up by ArticleCity or any of the other big article repositories, you'll frequently get the very nice surprise of seeing your articles picked up by lots of different publications. Hey, if you're good enough you can get into the ientry network of publications - webproworld and their other publications frequently republish articles from ArticleCity.com.

Which include affiliate links or domain-based affiliate redirect links for something you're trying to promote - so if you can't do press releases, think about trying for articles instead.

You never know until you try, right?