Why Spam Doesn't Pay!

I've mentioned this in a few threads now, but thought I would start a topic about spam in particular. I usually build backlinks almost completely manually. I have never used any software and usually engage in mass comment spam on drupal blogs and a few other platforms.

I could build up to 800 high pagerank backlinks per day to any number of websites. To do this the comments would almost always be thin and the topic of the website in most cases wasn't relevant to my website.

One website I built 3 months ago has accumalated around 4500 high pagerank backlinks in approximately 60 days. Now I have stopped all backlinking to this website but Google is still crawling some links.

After going through the link profile I can see that approxinately 80% of the backlinks I've built have been deleted or the website owner has got fed up and shut down their website. So that means that I have spent approximately 48 days during this time building spam links that now don't exist = pointless.

That's not to mention the fact that this is the real reason Google pumped my website, as they have crawled every link to my site and can see which ones still exist and which ones have been deleted (dead links) Conclusion? = Spam.

Matt Cutts has said "A real business is built to stand the test of time" meaning the more high quality links they have the less likely they are to be deleted. So with that in mind people that are continuing to spam will get caught sooner than later as the links are more likely to be deleted.

The same holds true for software like Scrapebox, after going through a AA list that is older than 6 months, I can see that >80% of the websites on that list are responding with a 404, so even if you spam a tier 1/2 websites, it's only a matter of time before those links start to drop off and send the target site toxic with dead links thus carrying a penalty that could affect all outgoing links.

So spam really doesn't pay and is mostly short lived. If you are thinking about building mass links or any type of backlink, then the first thing you should ask yourself is "Are these links going to last a lifetime?" "Is it a valuable contribution that won't get deleted in 2/3 weeks?"

If you can't answer "yes" to these questions then whatever method you are using will become counter-productive over a longer period of time and eventually you will lose your website.

All in all I would say links that you control would be better atm, like a few web 2.0, forum signature links and any other links that aren't likely to be deleted or the site isn't likely to be shut down in the near future. Where you have at least contributed some valuable content that is worthy of a backlink.