Andy Beard on Wide Circles aka WideCircles

Having used widecircles.com in the past, I came across another yet ludicrous article written by no one other then Andy Beard, the guy who claims to be some kind of SEO expert, yet can’t even rank his website high enough.

This is what Andy writes, “Wide Circles = Blog Comment Spam | Andy Beard”.

It is clear from reading the article and his comments that this guy never even bothered looking into other aspects of the company. WideCircles.com does not just provide relevant blog and forum comments but also they offer myriad of other services, when coupled together do in fact result in significant traffic increase and page rank and do help with SEO strategy overall.

He goes on saying how blog comments with signatures are dangerous and line people up for reputation disaster. Well Andy I got news for you, people HAVE in fact been using comments and signatures to get lot of inbound links to their sites many times in the past before, just do google searches on few big name domains and you will find out how they became big. Comments when done properly and by trained staff are not dangerous, they can increase your rank, help you with seo and allow you recieve lot of referral traffic.

The primary point here is that you are contributing valuable content to a website, ofcourse website owner will like the content if it matches his website, many webmasters in fact agree that they will provide link juice to people who supply them with good content, so this is not an exception. However I think what widecircles.com is targetting primarly is referral traffic as indicated by few commentators in Andy’s blog and not SEO part, but certainly SEO part does help and this is other part of the equation involved in optimizing someone websites.

Other thing he says is:

“Another thing to be cautious about, these are paid links, even the forum links, and Google are always on the lookout for link buying, especially on obvious web destinations such as popular webmaster forums.”

Common Andy, and you call yourself SEO expert, that statement is completely flawed. Google looks at content sometimes manually when they need to, not all the time, imagine what kind of work force they would need to analyze every single page. Also when the content is looked at, they look for spam, not for sincere and genuine comments. You think someone will penalize you, because some user decided to write a comment about your site on some blog ? That is completely ridicouls way of thinking. If that was true, then google would be banning sites left and right, just because some users decided they wanted to get rid of competition and started posting comments about companies on some forums.

Andy Beard always makes me laugh but this time he went over the top. Another statement he made:

“I have argued in the past that paid blog comments can be legitimate, but it is under very specific circumstances, that Wide Circles just does not meet.”

Ok, and what should they meet Andy ? You are forgetting there is myriad of providers out there who offer same kind of services ( paid commenting ), and some of which you personally supported. So why would their approach differ. Again if they provide paid comment service, and comments are genuine and not spammy, then anyone including the webmaster will approve them and leave them there because in reality they do contribute to the website, by providing related content that webmasters crave for, so giving a little of link juice should not be a problem.

Wide Circles does not go out and blatantly spam, they do actually look at the blogs, after all thats why they charge the price, which they do. And like I said earlier Andy you should have looked at other services they offer and whole range of things, before coming up with false accusations and statements which only fit into your own personal agenda against them. My reports are always unbiased and I intend to provide readers with clear view on the facts, which I can always back up.

Thanks.