What you are doing is selling ad space on boards and blogs (By advertising a product there in return for money), whithout paying the owners for the advertising.
You are trying to make it sound like you are doing something that doesn’t cause harm when what you are doing harms blogs and forums in two ways.
1. By not paying for advertising you are efectivly stealing from the Board/Forum operators. In the same way that pirating software is considered stealing.
2. By having people who aren’t experts in the field under discussion faking their knowledge you deminish the quality of the advice avaliable on that site or forum. This can adversly impact the popularity of the site which in turn can cost the owner through lost traffic, reputation and ad revenue

If you value a board or forum as a source of customers for the clients then you should be paying for ad space on that website, rather than stealing it by stealth.

By doing this you are going to be in violation of a great many sites usage agreements and thus should if the world is just face legal challange in the courts.

Prepare to be banned everywhere you go.

This is very dumb short term online marketing strategy. Any SEO company with their client’s long term online reputation at stake would realise that. Obviously there are some new people entering the space where a little bit of knowledge is dangerous.

This is extremely sloppy digi PR as @Karalee points out.

Ever heard of rel=”nofollow” It’s for comment spammers. If you want to know how SEO is done for the long term watch my show this week. This naive, ham fisted, amatuer, blunt instrument of comment spam really gets under my skin.

@shelia, I liked your post had a sense of humour to it (might have to check out your blog).

My analogy was merely pointing out that it’s nothing like someone politely jumping into a conversation to help based on their own experience, it’s someone jumping into a conversation to sell a product based on what they’re told to sell, not whether or not they agree with what they’re selling, or even whether they have first hand experience with it for that matter. My analogy also happens to be based on some fairly underhanded tactics that are used across the world to take advantage of tourists and locals alike – it’s not appreciated whereever it occurs because it’s nothing short of lying by ommission.

However, people do this already, they just pretend not to. I am put off them too. We get them adding us on Twitter all the time. I have people post on my blog NOW purely in the hope it will give them hits – most of them get caught by Akismet the anti spam thingie that comes with wordpress *says to both those companies, to please put the cheque in the mail for the plug*.

Go to any popular blog, smell the desperation in the comments section where people try to oh-so-casually impress. Sometimes they just post “this post reminded me of one of mine” or “you sound like you could use my product” and put in a link. (Not that all such posts are misleading adverts, when genuine, they’re often extremely helpful.) Any blog owner who leaves spam emails on their site just to make their comments section look good deserves to lose readers. While i remember, would like to thank Tim @Mumbrella for this opportunity (usual fee, usual place, Tim.)

*thinks* oh, wait, this is a popular blog… me posting here is bound to get me some hits… omg, i think i’m being unethical. Squee! This ROCKS, i can get a job in advertising or PR! At last! *skips off*

Despite the irrelevant personal attacks on Mr Emerson in this discussion, Il Jung’s summary:

“people overwhelmingly think that what you’re proposing is a bad idea and your staff should absolutely disclose their involvement at a bare minimum and avoid drive-bys on forums where it wouldn’t be appreciated by the owner”

is a fair (IMO), non-abusive way of stating the biggest problem with Mr Emerson’s proposal.

My constructive proposal is that if Mr Emerson persists with this product, I will tell any bloggers or comment moderators I know about it, and spread the story online. I’m guessing that most people who value having real opinions in their comment boxes would be hostile to the idea, and will be on the alert. If you agree with me, you should help spread the word too.

It’s not “constructive” to help spammers get away with it.

I have spoken to Tim and going to supply him a guest post for inclusion in Monday’s news letter. It’s of course up to Tim to run it or not, I hope that the new debate will be more constructive.

Cheers,

Geoffrey Emerson
MD – P2