Forums and blogs have become a very important part of the Internet landscape. I personally have learned almost as much about Internet marketing by diligently reading as I have from actual hands-on experience. With every positive experience, however, I have seen people trying to abuse the system. Forum and blog spammers, as Barry pointed out a couple weeks ago, can make the whole community experience a little less satisfying.
A couple of threads recently started at Search Engine Watch Forums has the same member asking about "Using Forums for SEO" and "Can I use someone else's blog to link to my site? " A few weeks ago, another poster detailed what he seemed to think was a new idea, saying "I was wondering if forums spam is something illegal with regarding to SEs?" he went on to describe his plan, but was a little worried about the Search Engines.
In my opinion, what they should really worry about is their status/reputation within their industry. In order to effectively do such a task and hope to get any SEO value from the links, they would have to be spamming a forum or blog somewhat relevant to their own industry. Imagine being known as "the guy/gal that's a spammer." Trust me, as a moderator at SEW, I have seen the reputation of seemingly very nice people go down the drain because of obvious link drops.
Not to mention many links that are placed within forums signatures and blog comments are blocked from being spidered by the site owner, and there ends up being no return on the time invested in spamming. Please give your thoughts or share your spamming success stories at any of the threads linked-to above.
I also dug up an older thread at Cre8asite Forums that has some good thoughts on this subject.
