Occasionally I get an email(spam) that a company will get our companies website placed near the top of the list of the google search results or another search engines search results simply by 'going' with their company.

Some of these companies are legit and will help you to update your website so that it is more searchable and gets the important words you want listed in the search engines indexs. Other companies do things that are not very legit. One of the techniques is to have links placed in the comments area of another companies article comments thus creating a link from their website to your website, this link will help improve your ranking.

The bad thing is that the links are typically off the topic of where they are placed. It could be an article on some war or political upset and it links to your website about selling your super duper widget. Since we host dozens of websites and our clients cumulatively have around 80,000 articles(and growing) in our database this presented a bit of problem to our clients(and consequently us). We wrestled with how to solve this problem if we put a confirmation picture as part of the process all the visually impaired end users would not be able to submit comments if we also put an audio file then we would also need to translate into the many langauges we support. Fortunately after an audit of comments a very simple solution appeared, we disallow 'http' to be posted. This http is required for the links of spammers and for real people they can simply remove it and the editor can add it back once it has been accepted. Of all our clients and the tens of thousands of comments that have been posted only one comment with an http was enabled by our clients many editors and webmasters, I guess our clients really do not like putting links to some random persons/companies website.

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