I implemented a DoFollow plugin back in August 2007 and it served me well for a couple of years, leading to an increase in traffic. However, in May 2009, the level of comment spam on this blog led to me disabling it. This is a consolidation of four posts covering that span.
Part 1 – Should I Follow?
About a month ago, I learnt what the nofollow tag on links in my blog meant. Very quickly, I became aware of the Bumpzee No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community and the existence of plugins to remove the nofollow tag. The question is: should I follow suite and get a plugin?
I have been mulling this over for several weeks now. At first I was quite enthusiatic, but I’ve started having a few doubts about the concept.
Is NoFollow A Bad Thing?
One of the main reasons I’ve been holding back is that I’m not convinced that the nofollow tag is a bad thing. In fact, I think in an ideal world, it would be a very good thing, as it limits people’s ability to boost their own PageRank. Instead, they have to rely on other people liking their content.
Will Disabling No Follow Increase Spam?
Another reason is that there seem to be a few people who are removing their plugins and reverting to the default nofollow behaviour. Reasons given are largely to do with being targeted for spam.
I am less worried by this. Spam is a fact of life. Also, if I join the community, not only am I opening myself to spam, I am opening myself to other traffic. If someone leaves a comment on my site that’s relative to the post, that’s good – even if their motive is to get a link to their site.
Decision Time
So, I’m not sure I agree that nofollow is bad thing, but disabling it may increase my traffic. Should I stick to my principles or should I sell out? 🙂
There’s something else: I have been checking out some of the blogs from the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community and leaving comments. Although there is no requirement for me to do so, I feel that if I’m going to benefit from other people disabling nofollow, then I should follow suite.
So, mostly for that reason, I’m going to look at plugins. I’ll start at Andy Beard’s excellent list of dofollow plugins, choose one and give it a try.
Part 2 – I’m Now Following
In my last post, I decided that I would disable the nofollow tag. I’ve now done this and have joined the Bumpzee No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community.
In the end, I opted for the Dofollow (WP Plugin) as listed on Andy Beard’s review (Note, this is not the original DoFollow plugin).
The main reason I chose this plugin is because you can specify a delay before the nofollow tag is turned off. I’ve set this to 2 days, which gives me a couple of days to prune spam comments before they get any link love.
Speaking of spam, I’ve have been warned by Chris, Terence Chang and Vegan Momma, in the comments of my last post. At the moment, my levels of spam are minimal (one or two a day), but I know this is likely to change.
I am looking at a couple of Math plugins to ensure that commenters are human (and not an automated bot). I am not sure which one I will use yet as the one I originally chose works on my local site, but not on my live site.
I’m not using Askimet, as apparantly it chews up the odd geniune comment (I need all the comments I can get at the moment!). I may look at SpamKarma, but probably not until the level of spam increases significantly.
Yes, if you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll have noticed that I’m completely unprotected right now, except for the built in WordPress spam protection! Not for much longer though.
Part 3 – Welcome Spam
Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned about disabling NoFollow. I have just started to be hit by spam: one comment about every 5 minutes for the last 4 hours. That adds up quickly!
They only seem to be targeting one post: WordPress – Taming The Advanced Editor. Obviously there is a bot which has picked up this post and is hurling comments at it.
I’d originally been hoping to avoid using Askimet as long as possible, because it does catch the odd genuine comment. However, it has now been activated and is working well.
I’ve also activated the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin. Last time I tried it, it didn’t work properly – it was not showing the numbers you were supposed to add, so there was no way to add comments. This now seems to be resolved, although I’m not sure how. Maybe just deactivating it (last week) and reactivating it (today) fixed it.
Hopefully this combination will protect me, but it’s clear I’ve now really got spam. No thoughts of backing out though.
Of course, I may be unfair in blaming disabling nofollow, as it’s been disabled for several days with only a slight increase in spam. I joined MyBlogLog in the last 24 hours, so maybe it’s related to that. I guess there is no way of telling.
Anyway, welcome spam!
Part 4 – Bye Bye DoFollow
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been a big supporter of the DoFollow movement, but the time has come to say goodbye to DoFollow comments on this blog.
I’m not alone in this move. Several bloggers that I follow have also turned off their DoFollow plugins in recent months. First K-IntheHouse turned off DoFollow as part of a redesign of Shankrila, then RT turned off DoFollow as well. Sometime previously, Terence Chang also turned off DoFollow.
So why are people abandoning DoFollow? The answer is comment spam.
I still believe in the DoFollow concept, but there comes a point when the amount of spam comments outweighs the number of good comments. For me, I’ve reached this point. I need to spend 20 to 30 minutes each and every day, just moderating comments. If I miss a single day, it’s a major job to catch up. I just don’t have to time to do this anymore.
Note, I’m not talking about automated comment spam – my anti-spam plugins prevent that. I’m talking about real live people who have targeted my blog just so they can get a link.
Many of the comments I receive are worthwhile and I don’t mind giving a link to these people. However, for every two or three people who take the time to make a genuine comment, there’s someone who does one of the following:
- Leaves a trivial "nice post" comment
- Obviously hasn’t bothered to actually read the post
- Just copies the text of another comment
- Leaves a flat out spam comment (read about topic x here)
- Leaves spam comments on dozens of pages in one session
- Links to a dodgy website (ie adult or pharmaceutical)
- Doesn’t use the KeywordLuv functionality as required
I have to spend a lot of time cleaning all of these up. As a result, I have very limited time to actually respond to anyone who leaves a comment. As K-IntheHouse points out:
I often see that I had missed replying to a genuine question or concern from a reader whom I could have helped in a timely manner
My thoughts exactly!
I’m also going to be turning off KeywordLuv on this blog, except on the KeywordLuv home page. This will remain nofollow so commentators won’t get any link love (thereby inviting spammers), but it will allow prospective users of the plugin to try it out.
I remain convinced that KeywordLuv and a DoFollow plugin are worthwhile, especially when you are starting out, but there is no doubt that it makes you a target of the spammers. I get hit pretty badly because I rank no 1 for KeywordLuv, which is what a lot of spammers search for.
The KeywordLuv / DoFollow combination is great for newer blogs that want to get some traffic. Also, some commentators will stick around and become valuable members of your community. The question is whether the number of spam comments is manageable.
They no longer are for me. Bye bye DoFollow.
I think that everybody has there own opinion but I am still using DoFollow these days. I was think of quiting it though but as of now, its still works for me.
You’re not selling to robots or animals. You’re selling to people whocare about the seller. Get what you want by first giving unconditionally. Manage what people think or feel about you and you’ll get what want easily. show them their profit and their expenditure is on safer part and they are getting better then their expenditure,
i was using dofollow as well and i will still continue to use this only
Sorry it had to come to that, but there are way too many people abusing your good nature as they abused mine.
The dofollow is supposed to be a reward for a contributing comment. When the spam comments outweigh the real comments by 10 to 1, all for the sake of a quick link, something is wrong.
Hi RT,
I’m sorry it had to come to that too. You’re right, something is indeed wrong with the situation, so I had to take this move. I really would like to reward people such as yourself, who leave genuine comments, but it’s just got to the point where it’s too much.
I may end up bring CommentLuv back (and making it dofollow) at some point in future, because at least that only works with blogs and that will presumably get rid of some of the spammers. We’ll have to see though.
I was sad that I had to go that route too. As you, RT and many others here have mentioned, DoFollow and KeywordLuv can definitely help a blog in its starting stage. But, once the spammers have caught on to your blog, the inevitable removal of dofollow is just a matter of when. I feel more at peace with less spam comments but it’s funny that there are still a few spammers who have their sights turned on mine even though I say above the comment form in bold that I have discontinued DoFollow & KeywordLuv! :-p
Ah the make money online niche has brought such wonders to our life! Though spammers are a scourge on the blogging world. Sure get your anchor text in but leave a meaningful message!
Over at my site my TC is dofollow, though I am lucky not a lot of people know about it, so yes I get the occasional anchor spammer but overall a PR5 link helps the real commentators.
Hi Donace,
Yep, if everybody left a decent message, then there’d be no problem. It’s just so many people don’t make the effort.
I agree with you. But not every poster is a spammer? there may be legit people trying to make a comment (with a link back to their or any other site) and get their link promoted here because YOURS blog is good in traffic. You’re getting this automatic benefit. Its still your choice to discard any comment.
I would prefer and suggest for DoFollow.
Hi sofomor,
In theory what you say is right:
In practice, there’s just too many comments for me to be able to check them all anymore.
You had spam protector..And if u are afraid of human spammer then u wait for some days and see who are giving comments to ur blog regularly approve them as dofollow and made others no follow(use comment luv otherwise…)
Hi Rohitk,
I have excellent spam plugins – it’s only the human spammers that are causing the problem. There are so many of them now that I can’t tell who are the regular commentators anymore. In an odd way, removing Dofollow will help me work out who the regulars are. They’re the ones I really do want to reward – I may bring back dofollow in some form in future to reward them. But not in the short term.
I think you’ll need more than 1 post a month to see us regular commenter about 😉
But… but… I’m here for the DoFollow Comment!!!
Actually, I’m not joking… It’s shameless, but that is why I’m here. It doesn’t mean I don’t read the entry and try to leave a worthwhile comment though. Turning it on can bring some good visitors who might even return. Comments do need moderation though. If comments can’t get through without a moderators approval, it’s greater incentive for the comment spammer to actually read the post.
I do tend to agree with you. The amount of irrelevant comments i get on my blog just dilutes the decent comments I receive. I slightly see the sense in Sofomor’s comment. You do get good traffic with dofollows.
Hi, sorry to read you have to take this measure. Apart form anti robot tools like captcha and Akismet isnt it possible to write some sort of quality rules that comments have to meet, like for email spam protection?
For example:
minimum amount of words
stopwords xx not allowed
etc.
I now this starts a ongoing war between comment spammers and the rules, but it can work out?
With the kind of traffic you already get guess it makes sense. I think a lot of us will miss the links though! All the best.
It’s truly unfortunate that people abuse the comment area and push there adult sites or attempt to sell cheap drugs over the internet. It ruins it for all of us SEO’s. Yes I am trying to get a backlink when I make comments but at least attempt to write a meaningful comment.
Hi,
I think do follow link is useful to build a linking on a new established blog but I think your blog has ‘famous’ already. By the way I’m still using the dofollow link to my site.
Well.. I think you are right, I am not using it for the same reason!
:-p as if asking what 5+7 is doesn’t make it hard enough lol.. but seriously I came here looking for good content, I found it and I read it.. I also bookmarked your site as a worth while site to participate in because of your views on dofollow, which I also utilize on my sites.. Getting a followed link is motivation for me to come back to a site and take the time to participate, that is what encourages me to comment. I read a lot of sites, but I will admit I am about 3000% more likely to comment on a site that doesn’t say I don’t count by nofollowing my link.
Just my 2 cents 🙂
wow..damned that spammers…they doesn’t respect the do follow’s owner…sigh..spam is still the biggest problem on the do follow blog I think..
I found that in many blogs when we comment it jus appears or they don’t get accepted at all. Even if we comment something related to the topic. Because I don’t like to spam by just saying anything and keep my link there. I don’t know why the blogs chose such a plug in where we can’t even know if the comments are sent.
I use dofollow quitely, just because I think it is the right thing to do, but I do not use the phrase dofollow on my site to reduce spamming.
nofollow just makes nonsense. i dont understand what google mean to do this. but i can understand bloggers using nofollow. ithink dofollow better as long as it is used right.
it is not a problem, dofollow or nofollow. give a good comment and useful, and leave the web address for you. example: myweb.com – The Internet Marketing Mastery. just like that. comments good and interesting, visitors here will also be interested to see your web
I thought to enable this on few of my sites, but now I decided otherwise.
Maybe I will even remove website field, those who feel that they need to say something, will say it without website field or with it.
Hellas,
I suggest keeping the website field. It helps you learn a little more about the people visiting your site.
Bye Bye do follow! Well if it takes 20-30 minutes a day of your time up to sort out the spam comments then i don’t blame you for turning it off! Hopefully this blog will still be just as successful without do follow.
Thanks Paul,
I appreciate the wish.
I don’t think, that it makes a big difference, if links are dofollow or nofollow. Google does know it better anyway.
This is really sad that dofollow movement is dying. I think all the people , whose ibjective is only getting link from dofollow blogs no matter their comment is making any contribution to the post.
As a owner of your site you have all rights to maintain your blog as do follow or nofollow. you are absolutely right that it is difficult to moderate spam comments daily. Some peoples just wants to use your blog for link promotion… that is worst thing.
Yeah you right…. spam comment these days just like a virus, they never stop for spreading from one blog to another blog. Even you have great plugin in your blog for fighting a spammer but they always find another way to spamm again. Maybe this reason all bloggger is not active their dofollow pluggin again. Get lost you spammer…
Yeah James,
It’s such a pity that they spoil it for everyone…
The interesting thing is, all blogger who reply here saying they still with dofollow are actually nofollow . I don’t know, why they lie.
Easy, because alot of people go out searching for dofollow blogs to comment on. They find the comment (with the lie), and go to the blog to post a comment with link. Most of these people do not take the time, or do not have to knowledge, to look through the code to check if it really is dofollow…
For those calling people liars, please keep in mind that there are other reasons why your “attempted spam” comment is still nofollowed even on a dofollow blog. It could be by the site owners choice, it could also be due to other restrictions/requirements in place for comments.. don’t be so quick to throw out names when you don’t know what you are saying 🙂
If you go to a dofollow blog and see comments that have followed links and your isn’t there is a reason for it.. Honest participation is the best practice, try to be a turd and you will be found out, that’s just how it is.
You may have a point there Jesse, thanks for the enlightenment!
I still dofollow but used a plugin (lucia’s?) to wait after 3 comments prior to giving dofollow. And of course, a captcha plugin works wonderfully to keep spammers at bay.
I don’t know, but isn’t there a new google rule about the line between dofollow and nofollow getting really thinner now?
I finally came around to re-activating Keywordluv and Dofollow on my blog. With a strong comment policy in place, the spammers have been 90% careful not to waste their time commenting on my blog. Most of my traffic come in via Google using phrases with keywordluv in them so I’ve deactivated all comments on my Keywordluv Rocks! post. Surprisingly enough, ever since the implementation of my new comment policy, like 60% of commentators actually leave their names and not keywords.
This is hoping Keywordluv survives all wordpress upgrades since you ain’t developing it again. I would really love to have it on my blog forever.
I understand why some feel being dofollow eventually takes too much time. I have many great regular readers and commentators who make visiting my blog a priority because I use CommentLuv and KeywordLuv.
Everyone is tight on time and must get the maximum return on what they do with it. I feel that offering dofollow is one way to keep visiting and commenting in my blog on their to-do list.
Reaching businesses is a priority for me so offering them a link with their choice of anchor text is a good way to encourage them to read and hopefully even implement the ideas I offer on growing their traffic and conversions.
You could consider using Lucia’s Link Love plugin and setting the number of comments required to make them dofollow between three and ten. That will shut down many drive-by spammers.
We have a new way to save time for those who choose to stay dofollow (or even those who don’t). Andy over at CommentLuv has developed a new anti-spambot plugin that blocks 95% of all spam and let’s all the real comments through.
Between that and using the blacklist function built into WordPress to block manual spammers by the URLs they promote or the keywords they target and you can have an almost spam-free blog in minutes a day instead of hours.
The plugin is in the official WordPress plugin directory under GrowMap anti-spambot plugin (G.A.S.P. for short) Just searching for GrowMap should bring it up or you can get information on the G.A.S.P. tab in my blog. I’ll link it to this comment to make it easy to find.
Hi Gail,
Thanks for letting the readers know – it sounds great (I’ve already read up on it but haven’t managed to find time to try it yet).
This is the only reason people are turning off the no-follow attribute from there site. My friends are facing the same problem and that’s why I have also suggested him to use no follow index. In my opinion blogs helps to increase knowledge and also to share our views for a particular topic. We must use it in the genuine manner not by irritating posters and visitors both.
I knew this day would come, i see a lot of blogs do the same thing,
I created my own blog not just to long ago, with do follow, now i know how anoying it is for admins to clear up all those worhtless comments.
Wow! A lot of information, and having only started blogging less than two months ago, and already getting loads of spam to moderate, I’m now nervous that I have dofollow on my blog – well, I think I have it, lol I’m still learning about blogging – but one person on my blog who commented said I have the “all important URL option” to encourage people to leave a comment, so I presume he meant dofollow?
I also added Comment Luv as was hoping to encourage even more people to leave decent comments, now I’m not sure if I should delete these options, or hang in there for a while – since, I’m still new (my blog, lol) and I see it mentioned above that newbies may benefit, at least at first, from using dofollow etc, but I don’t want to sit up night and day moderating spam either! Hm, what to do?
I’m just learning about the value of linking and KeyWord Luv. I can certainly understand your plight in sifting through the crap. We only have so much time…
Hopefully there will be a new plugin or work around to better eliminate those time wasting activities. Thanks though for the info.
Steven,
I was going to write a big long post about how shameful it has become that so many bloggers are doing this. Promoting a product, but not fully allowing the benefits of it themselves. But I realized it is an exercise in futility.
Steve, You have a great blog here. Every time I have come here I have always learned something new. I hope you pages continue to rank highly.
Thanks for your work.
William
You’re giving too much inmportance to comments in your blogs man..
i have dofollow in all my blogs and haven’t had any problems with that whatsoever.
Spammy comments are there with or without dofollow, just stop doing a big deal out of it!
You’re gonna have to moderate comments anyway, and what’s the problem with somebody puting a keyword instead of their name??
I’m gonna be laughing of you and all the people “you read” when Google eliminates the nofollow tag from it’s algorithm.
Hey guys, how would you have survived the web before the nofollow tag? You would have killed yourself!
Pathetic!!!!
Hi Publicidad,
Thanks for your comment. Short answer: I used to spend 30 minutes a day moderating comments, now I spend 5 minutes. I agree spam will always be there, but for me it’s about minimizing it.
I have been there always for dofollow blogs. Making comments and making it for sure that it is worthwhile staying on their sites. That is why i have come across with your site because of this. All of us has some opinions and belief that others may not follow. Will they follow if they don’t believe you?
Spam has been around since the internet has become what I consider to be “modernised”.
Spam was here before WordPress and will be here after WordPress and anything I can do to minimise the amount of spam whether its askimet, captcha i consider a godsend!
I have done an experiment on all my blogs using nofollow and dofollow over 3 months and there was no increase or decrease in the amount i received. I use dofollow on all my blogs to encourage comments but there also has to be a line drawn somewhere…
My blog is still do follow.I can understand you have turned yours off because you obviously have a lot of traffic.I manually approve all comments, this is how I take care of the spam problem.
Is the keyword love plugin better to use and will it increase comments?
Aw.. sorry it had to turn out this way..
This is interesting to me because I just made my site Do-Follow. I have one question: If I go back to having a No-Follow site, are all of the good commentators’ links on my site now worthless, or just their future comments?
-Tourq
(see my earlier post too)
I couldn’t work out if my blog was do follow or not, then somebody told me it wasn’t, but I was wanting it do follow, at least for a while – worked out how to see in the coding if it’s do follow or not, and saw it wasn’t. Then got a plugin – a while ago now, I think a wordpress plugin but it made only the url visitors leave in the comment block do follow – it didn’t affect the the person’s name above the comment (which links to their site) – I would like to know how to make this do follow automatically – I can do it manually in the coding, but would like it automatic. When trying to submit my site to do follow lists it is not accepted because I don’t have it automated in the name section. So many people seem to still have do follow, but I can’t find where to do this, or get it from. I’ve even asked the question on my blog, but nobody has told me how to sort it out yet.
Until my traffic gets really high, I don’t mind using it and akismet is helping with my spam.
Hi Stephen
Great shame but it’s the way of the world… a few spoil it for the rest of us!
I was thinking of using CommentLuv on my site but was in two minds.
Interesting that you differentiate between established sites and new sites.
My site is only a few months old so I may still use CommentLuv.
I can totally see where you are coming from. I also have a few blogs and get a fair amount of spam posts but the fact is some are actually useful for readers to find products and offers that might not have the big marketing budget as some of these national brands. I didn’t think it was a big deal and was in the practice of leaving them in I did try an experiment and when I did turn off do-follow the fact was I received much lower quality postings after the fact.
Oh dear, that’s such a shame. Sounds like you were a victim of your own success as it were. I think dofollow, commentlluv and keywordluv will still be helpful for less popular blogs or perhaps ones that are less associated with comment spam keywords. It’s such a shame that some people have to leave inane comments that spoil it for everyone else.
I can appreciate that rationale. It is a shame that some people take short cuts – I mean how hard is it to read and post something intelligent? It’s too bad because I’d love to get a follow link for making an intelligent, insightful comment that contributes to a discussion and I’d like it if my blog didn’t look like a ghost town in the comment area. So I must be dofollow and accept the “great article” spam or have no comments whatsoever. You have a quality problem 😉
Hi Jeff,
Yeah, it’s a bummer. I have the same approach on other blogs. I’d like a link, but I’m willing to actually take part in a discussion to get it. I won’t leave a throw away comment just for a link – but there are many who will.
How about using something that only makes it dofollow after 5, 10 or 20 comments? This way you still reward the loyal readers but lsoe the spammers?
Lucias Linky Luv does this I believe?
just a thought!
Keep up the good work.
Hi Olly,
Actually, what I found was that people were all over my site, leaving 20+ comments in a session… Those people spoiled it for everybody.
Since this blog is not do follow anymore why not check out my list of do follow sites instead.
Ask me..My domain is 1 year old…it was a static htmla site..which was quite abandoned…now during my last year i got some time ..i revamped it as a blog…and within 3 days i got 20 s*x related D**gs comments and some forex comments..I mean my blog was not indexed also…but i still Do-Follow..u cant refuse good comments what they deserve…i use comment luv,,and is downloading keyword luv..i think spammers will always attack for the sake of their “black hat” ways which never yields in long run…but that doesnot mean that we shud give up some thing gud as dofollow..
I recently created a post about the “no-follow” tag and for some reason, I’m getting 50+ “trackbacks” on this post alone. I’m still kind of new to all this blogging stuff although I’ve managed websites for years and it still blows my mind how much spam is out there.
Even though the sites that these trackbacks come from aren’t always legitimate, I don’t mind the extra links out there.
My blog still remains somewhat of a do-follow blog. I don’t use the do-follow tag, but I also don’t use the no-follow tag. The few automated spams I get always get deleted for me and lately, the only human spam I’ve gotten has been minimal, so I’m not too overwhelmed at this point.
I wanted to ask you one thing, is it possible to keep a blog nofollow but still issue selective dofollow to some commentators? Is there any way to do this? I am asking this keeping in mind your point that you don’t mind giving some dofollow links to people who are sending valuable comments. How can I reward those readers/commentators?
Kaushik, I use Lucia’s Linky Love for just that purpose. After a commentor has spent time on my website and has 5 comments they become dofollow. I also switch off comments on old posts.
Well the, riddle me this….
If you’re not willing to spend 20 or 30 minutes to remove what you call spam comments, why should I spend 20 or 30 minutes reading your site, and clicking your links?
i understand what you saying, actually im always going around blogs to send my link, but i always take the time to read carefully what peopple are talking about. If you have many spam, as you sayid, how you will awnser to those who really came to see your content.
But on the other side, you got to think you still geting people to read you blog, even if they come just to get a backlink, some will read, some not..
but.. some will accept some not.. i respect your opinion.. and i think i wouldnt have a dofollow blog.. for the same reason as yours..
Thanks.
I definitely know how you feel when talking about spam/worthless comments. I was away for a while only to come back and had 100’s of bad comments all aimed at viagra, levitra and the like websites and some of them were downright offensive. When one of the posters found out I wasn’t approving them, he started filling my comments up by telling dirty jokes and it went on for quite awhile. It’s nice to see the posts from some of the good people on this site but I don’t blame you one bit for protecting your time. Too bad the self-righteous part of society ruins it for everybody. Thanks for letting me sound off about that here. Have a good one.
Nice post!
Hehe, just kidding! 😉
I actually cant believe the amount of people who actually think that “Nice post” or “Hey, great website” are actually going to get approved? I just doont understand? But then I think, well surely they must get some links out of it otherwise they wouldnt bother right? To be perfectly honest, I would just feel to embarrsed to write that and I think it also gives a bad perception of the website you want a link to, because people will just think you are a an annoying spammer and will rip you off!
Do you think that someone will ever invent something that stops spam 100% and we can just enjoy the online blog and forum community without annoying people making more work for blog and forum owners?
I blame Google! If they didnt exist there wouldn’t be comment spam. Oi, Google…its your fault! Hehe, only joking, dont sue me Google.
Over and out.
I know. I have commentluv and on another blog I have 50+ comment spam and it’s not even do follow.
What do you when people leave comments in another language? I kept the ones on mine because I was going to google translate them but I’m too lazy sometimes.
Hi Meili,
Actually I’m not consistent. I do sometimes look at the sites to see what they are, but at other times I just delete them. But these days I never just keep them – in the past, I found that some of these were linking to pornography sites and I didn’t want that.
Thank You, Stephen.
I use CommentLuv on my blog, but there are so many plug ins that I currently have on mine that I do not know which ones to scrap.
Having a No Follow rule is fine, because if the commentator (the one leaving a comment about the post) makes the comment relevant & engaging, he can still get hits to his/her site by writing enough so that the reader wants to read more from the contributor.
Thanks again!
Best,
-Kevin
Thank you for sharing your discoveries with KeywordLuv and DoFollow. I’ve been following this discussion closely through multiple blogs.
I recently read a post that said to market your business one should post 1,000 posts a day! I’m thinking you’re kidding, right? The poster went on to say why. Unfortunately, this is the way of the world now – spammers are everywhere. Years again when I started designing for the web I thought the whole blogging / twitter junk would go away. I was wrong. We now have professional bloggers all over the web doing exactly what I mentioned above.
Personally, I fought the blog impulse for years. But with the current economy I thought why not. As many of you have mentioned my first blog posts were similar with spammers posting multiple times minute after minute. So I too am reluctant about using a do-follow. The way I see it – I’ve got to monitor my contributors either way. I did find a nice little plugin that turns comments on or off with a click which I use for a week or two if the spamming get to obnoxious.
In time I do believe someone will write a nice plugin for us. But, the spammers will find a way around it. And the circle will begin again.
“Matches Malone Says:
Well the, riddle me this….
If you’re not willing to spend 20 or 30 minutes to remove what you call spam comments, why should I spend 20 or 30 minutes reading your site, and clicking your links?”
I am totally agree with him.
if someone comments on your blog with really concern comment. and they also want feed back . so just because of “Dummy comments” you can not heart those people who really appreciate you .you should have right to remove “Dummy comments”.
I find that I am spending far too much time trying to find out which is best thing to do. My wordpress is only a few weeks old and I just added the “commentluv” plug in. But I have no idea of my site is do follow or no follow. How do you find out? Is it a case of checking the source code or something?
I did once write a post mentioning that I was going to find out but after doing some research around the web the differing opinions is striking (and confusing for me).
At the moment I am having some troubles with the spam comments which are automated and absolutely full of links to dubious sites. I have learned to very quickly send them to spam but I can imagine they will get worse as time goes on.
Maybe later I will need to invest in that “askimet” … but I think I would still be checking all the comments to make sure askimet hasn’t spammed a genuine comment. HMMM
Keep going I guess for now and things will slip into place.
I also have the new keywordluv to investigate now… phew keeps you on yer toes eh?
Well that sucks. I had a link that sent me to your website to download the keywordluv pluggin. Now you are scaring me away from even doing it.
I believe you missed some research on this one. DoFollow is a keeper. I have had TONS of comment spam as well. I got rid of it easily by using Conditional Captcha which pretty much eliminated every single piece of spam. DoFollow stays to benefit my true commentators. I believe you should reconsider and use that plugin.
Hi Brandon,
My problem isn’t with the auto bots that comment, it’s with real live people who are just after the link and don’t bother to read the post or leave a half decent comment. I still get a dozen of those comments a day, but when I was dofollow it was closer to 50 per day. I couldn’t even see the decent comments in there, so I gave up responding to comments at all. It was unworkable for me…
You are right. Before I was up in the air about the Dofollow movement, if it was my blog or not, but it seems that there is more spam than ever. With all the extra spam comments, it’s just a waste of time that could spent doing some other productive things with my blogs. There are benefits to both movements obviously, but I definitely agree with your dofollow view.
I’m a little new to blogging but not design and development. Last June I finally added the blog element to my site. It’s really unfortunate to find two-thirds of the comments are nothing more than spam. Honestly, how hard is it to make a comment that pertains to the topic, of conversation? I’m considering writing my next post about comment edict.
Here are my findings so far – Cons: Two out of three comments are spam, or someone asking if they can copy my post or theme, which they do anyway and don’t credit back. Pros: My site is getting four times the hits it did before the blog, and those who do engage are more serious about a website presence. Overall, while it is frustrating to deal with the spam the numbers show there must be plenty of viewers who visit and don’t comment. With that in mind I consider my blog as cheap advertisement. I turn off the comments when I’m tired of dealing with it, and back on when it seems appropriate.
This is the first I heard of KeywordLuv and I followed it to this post. I think it’s a great idea for new blogs so I’m willing to try it. If I start getting lots of generic copy/paste comments I can decide what to do then.
I’m experiencing the same thing actually and have not looked back since removing dofollow and keywordluv from my blog. I’m starting out in blogging too, and the amount of trivial and irrelevant comments left by real people is more of a concern to me than spam bots, since plugins can take care of that for now.
Still figuring out a way for people to leave really great comments. For now, I leave it to discretion and leaving comments of real value on others’ blogs… I believe in getting what I give, so I’ll be patient…
I am saddened by your decision to dump do follow. I too sometimes battle with spam, but I have created a system that seems to stop human spammers in their tracks. I moderate every single first comment weeding out the spammers. I have set my spam settings disallowing any name over 15 characters which immediately excludes all of the my p3n1s is bigger than your, usernames. I only start following links when a user has posted a minimum of 5 comments.
I was looking at your plugin to see if It would add value and allow users the right to use keywords as well but I have not yet made that determination,
It’s unfortunate that so many bloggers are using so many spam comments…actually, I think they are paying others to get them links and these people are doing most of the spam.
I have one blog that I get nearly 100 comments on per day and nearly 90% of the comments seem to be spam. I read all of these and it takes a lot of time, so I understand why you are doing this.
I linked to your keywordluv site and then followed a link to here to understand nofollow and dofollow (I’m relatively new to blogging but this is a growing extension to my fitness coaching business).
I figured that nearly all comments on my site are comment spam – even comments that appear to be fitness related. Will the dofollow get more people to comment? I didn’t know what nofollow or dofollow was until today (thanks for the explanation!) – I guess I will have to disable the nofollow and see what happens.
Thanks for your post – it does make a difference!
Greg
I think those who spam will spam on anything…they don’t check if you have a DoFollow blog or not. I believe this because I do have one website that is NoFollow (and, it’s clearly posted), but I get nearly 100 comments per day. I like visitors to my website, but from many of the comments, you can tell that they didn’t even read what I had posted. It’s a nuisance and wastes a lot of my time.
I am inclined to agree that spammers are going to spam on everything and anything anyway. I had no idea there was anything called a dofollow until last night. I think it is a wonderful thing. I am only starting to learn about the advantages of links.
I have a very ordinary youtube partner channel and I do get a lot of what I now understand is spam. The way I look at it is, I am trying to set up a business on the web and part of that work will include coming in each morning and cleaning up after the night before, just like if my business was say a pub or a restaurant, I would clean up all the rubbish that people have left behind before I started into my day.
I will be setting up a blog and I will have dofollow because it does help those who are genuinely getting something going, at the end of the day we are all in this together and none of us can do it alone. We all rely on various tools supplied by others from blogs to search engines to apps etc.
There will always be those greedy folk that will abuse and take advantage, but if everybody turns off apps like this then no one prospers.
Keep thinking of the good guys.
Kind regards Johnnie Lawson
Interesting post – I have had a few comment spams – most are well behaved, but usually along the lines of, “This was just what I was looking for…blah blah blah” to try to make the commend seem fair. That’s just pointless.
It looks like the math quiz above would suffice as a way to weed out a lot of the spam. I have mine on nofollow currently, and I moderate them all too, but I’m tempted to give them a shot with dofollow and keywordluv, and add in some other safety algorithms too.
What is really dumb is that SEO is driven from backlinks like this, even though high pagerank does not necessarily mean that you have a good product, are reputable, and so on. Shame that Google can’t detect comment spam, and ignore it.
I’lll check back here again soon, and will let you know if I do find a good way to enable the dofollow commenting without a massive overhead of spam.
Hi Sephen!
Not sure you will read this. But I need you opinion. My site is coupon site and I use WordPress for it. Comments are coupons. And I’m really thinking about trying CommentLuv and DoFollow to stimulate people to post coupons on my site. But of course I will need to moderate it a lot because it seems easy to post a fake coupon. It’s much shorter than a comment to article.
How do you think shall I try?
Thanks in advance!
Hey Stephen
ThankYou for sharing this, but is it really a do-follow league is over?
I recently created my website and gaining some backlinks do-follow, yeah era has changed now for SEO person, many new techniques are available for backlinking Nowadays. don’t know how much commenting help out to it.
BTW thanks for sharing
🙂
Hey Stephen, Highly Appreciated ! The quality of that post shows the amount of efforts you put into this!