One of the many reasons you should be using a solution such as Wordpress it does most this automatically. Reasons that many people continues to advise clients to use wordpress as it helps you follow best practice.

great piece, Barry....that comments MUST be policed for sure!

:-)

Jim

And yet many people in the SEO community continue to share lists of so-called "dofollow" blogs. It's no wonder why many people think SEOs are nothing but spammers.

So can it harm you or not? I wrote something that is in slightly in contradiction to this: http://www.dejan.com.au/seo_news_link_building_tip.html

Curious to see what others think. PS: Of course SPAM is bad. But can it hurt you? Competitors can do it to harm your rankings as it's easy enough.

There seems to be some confusion here over which site suffers from the spam links, the site with the spam links on it, or the site the spam links lead to. Common sense would suggest it's the site with the spam on it, because if it were the other way around then you could, if I read the post correctly, get a competitor penalised simply by relentlessly creating spam links at them. This would invalidate Google's algorithm and thus their business model. However, again if I read this right,"If I spammed comment fields of third party sites, what should I do?
If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you've cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request." then that's exactly what a competitor is able to do, get a site penalised by creating spammy links to it. If the site isn't penalised, why the suggestion then that a reconsideration request be made? I think this is a confused and illiterate posting. I'd be inclined to write it off as obviously nonsensical, no matter its alleged origins.

BB