Understanding Blog Spam And How Not Do It

I had the most interesting encounter in Reddit recently with a user who accused me of blog spam. Of course, having a slight understanding of what the term was, but not that it was a real term, I decided to do a little research. I know this might sound a bit know-it-all, but I am almost certain other bloggers have run into these type of users who really have no idea what spamming entails, especially in regards to blogging and using social media in the social networking and social bookmarking communities. In fact, not one, but 2 of my articles that were top roundups about WordPress layouts I found that were handy for certain webmasters looking for those type of themes were accused the the same user.

So, here is what I found and how not to blog spam.

According to Wikipedia,

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards.

In my case, I manually bookmark and share my links, or my visitors graciously do this, so in my case, and since my posts really have not been commercial in nature do not constitute as such. You are within your rights to share your blog or other links in any social network or social bookmarking system. In fact, most of their services highly encourage it, but they also warn about spamming. So it is a use at your risk type of situation. If the article is not yours, you are required to give credit, but you are still able to share those links anywhere.

It is when you post unrelated material to those networks and keep doing so in a manner that may be assumed that you are trying to force people to go to that link. No matter if your articles or the ones you plug are commercial or not, you have to be certain that others will not take offense to such material. For example, in Twitter, there are users that will send you reply messages and try to get you to try their product. After further look into the matter, you will find that the person has contacted many other users with the same or similar message. That is spam. Even if the message is to go to a blog, that is blog spam.

You could also create this when publishing paid to blog articles as well. How? Well, if your sponsored posts have no relevancy to your site’s focus, some of your visitors may feel that you are spamming them. Make sure to choose paid post opportunities that fit as closely to your blog’s niche.

What constitutes as blog spam to you? What other suggestions can you make to avoid the possibility of blog spamming? Have you ever been accused of spamming with your blog?