I am one of the administrators for this blog. Among other things, it gives me a view of a dashboard where I can monitor all the comments that are posted on all the blog entries. I understand spam, and I get why some people still fall for it. I also know why people do it; they usually spam in order for their website links to appear on our blog and other websites so that their rankings will increase in search engine results (due to that site linking). So, in an associative kind of way, if Spam = increase search engine results due to site linking, and increased search engine results = better SEO, does Spam=SEO?
Obviously to me, Spam != SEO, unfortunately Spam has made SEO look bad due to people identifying certain aspects of the Google algorithm that allows for better search engine rankings.
Also, many people have a tendency to utilize old methods that may have worked at one time (such as blog commenting and utilizing exact match anchor text), but these methods aren’t working as effectively due to Google’s Spam team identifying these tactics and trying to prevent them.
It’s an interesting point though and I’m curious to see how the Search Landscape will change given the other factors that are now influencing search engine rankings.
I think it’s like a lot of things. While there is good in SEO, someone has found a way to corrupt it. What’s fascinating to me is how this blog along can accumulate thousands of spam comments in an hour.
The problem is SEO itself. It attempts to enforce relevance (as in what do people find relevant), but really it tests for what it’s algorithms find easy to test. Since this is ultimately simplistic, its enforcement schemes are easy to predict. Thus it is easy to game SEO. Pretty much all ‘success activity’ seeks to game circumstances to individual advantage. When the results seem out of control, that’s when you know the system itself is out of balance.