Do-Follow Spammers
Posted on September 29, 2007
Filed Under uncategorized |
Some time ago I changed the comments on this blog, from No-Follow to Do-Follow. The effect of this has been very positive. The amount of comments has definitely increased, and so have the number of visitors. This is rather obviously, since people are desperate to get inbound links. There are several bloggers who have made huge lists, of blogs which has allowed do-follow comments. Now this makes me wonder which kind of visitors I get here. Surely, a lot of the people commenting in here are doing so, because they have an opinion which they want to share. But there are also a lot of spammers, who write short comments like “Thanks for sharing”, although I have not shared anything besides my own opinion about a subject. When I click their link, I am taken to some affiliate sales page or Made For AdSense site. This is really annoying. When I started blogging, spammers were easily caught by spam filters, because the comments usually were stuffed with links, thus easy to identify. But this is different, and can’t be caught by Akismet.
Since the amount of visitors I get, is rather limited, there is no problem in handling this manually. But for the bloggers who think of this as a problem, it might be an idea to make a comment policy for the people making comments on your blog. I think this might be one of the best ways to get around this problem. Simply write a few statements to make people aware, that you will not accept ULR’s linking to MFA or affiliate pages, comments which add no value to the discussion, etc. Although you still have to go thru the comments manually, I am sure this will work in the long run. If spammers are told, comments will not be published (or deleted) if they do not obey the following rules, they might think a second time before they spam your blog. Not because they want to follow your rules, but because they don’t want to spend their valuable time doing something which has no effect. Spammers will go somewhere else, where they know that any comments will be published. And the ones who actually do want to contribute to an interesting discussion, might spend a few seconds more to write some well considered thoughts.
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I use the do follow list in the beginning but i have found a LOT of good blogs through it.
DoFollow has definitely helped a lot of bloggers looking for hits and comments, but the expense as you said, can be a little frustrating. I have had many of the same experiences. Spam protection is one thing that can clear away bots, but many people have also set their comments up to be approved before even posting, which can also have its expense, having to go through everything manually anyway. At what expense will people pay for visitors and comments. If you’re getting some legitimate traffic and build regulars, I don’t see the problem. Good luck with DoFollow…and all of the comment surveillance.
do follow is good for all new blogs. hey it drives some traffic to my blog and i get a few backlinks true this. there are always some people how do something bad out of a good idea. so where are more then 10 people in the net there gona be some spamers too. fight spamers not blogs.
The answer is quite simple. They have to answer one quest abou tthe post prior to leaving a comment. Then they would actually have to read the post, which would be too time consuming for spammers or if it’s a topic that doesnt interest them, they will go elsewhere.
yes many users tries to find do follow blogs so it will help their PageRank and maybe also their trafiic but some others abuses this kind of stuff. Those people who spam on do follow sites want there PR to get high on very short time, they just dont want to wait.
“Patience and hardwork is always the best formula”
I understand about spam in comments I have been dealing with it also. I am very new to blogging and seem to always learn things the hard way and thru trial and error. I tried the remarks thing but they still try to drop spam in. Here is dumb question and hope you don’t mind. I am dofollow and never dropped a URL in comments and want to ask how I do it?
do I get credit for my website URL where it says enter website or do I only get it in the comments box here http://www.thaidarling.blogspot.com ?? I notice search engine indexes my name as thaidarling only if I use the top box. Any info would be nice
Thank you
dee. PS Im not spam :p
Although sadly, I am one of the visitors who comes here desperately searching for inbound links, I will say that Patience and Hardwork are the best formula. I’ve tried a lot of different free traffic exchange services, only to realize how cruddy they end up. Akisment is useful for spam, but one of the bad things about following links is the increased comments spam as well as the negative PageRank for linking to bad sites.
I also think that dofollow is a good thing. At least people come to your site and comment on it. I mean some might come because you have a dofollow blog but then they might find your blog interesting and will post something worth while. I think there is even a good chance that those people will come back if they think the blog is interesting. I see dofollow rather as a marketing tool for my blogs - the good thing about it is that those targeted try to do some SEO but you already succeeded to lure them in =)
I used DoFollow when I first started my “Make Money” blog theinternetexperiment.com
I was getting so many spam comments it just wasn’t worth it.
I don’t mind when people leave MFA sites, as long as they leave an intelligent comment.
Things like…
“Very informative post, I will look into it”
just piss me off.
I guess it comes with the territory when you go DoFollow.
One plus…even if you do get a lot of spam comments…it may be boosting ur Alexa rankings.
;o)
I use Wordpress. As most of my comments are spam, I just use the ’select all for deletion’ button, then untick any genuine ones. Flush! Takes a few minutes only.
The do-follow option does come with some drawbacks but in my experience it benefited my blog more than it took away.
Spammers can be annoying and when your site grows can also become a lot of work if your spam filter doesn’t pick them up.
Yes, I did arrive here because your blog is on a list. But it is not a do follow list. It is a list of blogs that readily accept comments. I do however when I visit a blog never just leave a spam comment. I truly try to leave a comment that is of interest and related to the subject of the blog post. And I have found some very interesting blogs where I return to read more. So this is not just commenting but visitng and learning.
Do Follow only helps to share Pagerank, but the real about this that all bloggers get some relevance by commenting on post, doesn´t matter if the blog follow or not you URL, the only think that u don´t share is the PR.
I have to admit that I found this site through Courtney Tuttle’s DoFollow list but I have one rule that I use when commenting, no matter the reason…make sure my comments are relevant. I have a DoFollow blog and I have quite a few spammers showing up. However, I use the Akismet WP plugin and it automatically puts it in a spam folder. I go in there weekly and find a few comments that really aren’t spam and I allow them to be published. It has worked well for me, you might want to look into it.
The Askimet plugin has been working really good for me, but I do understand that my blog is new. You folks with thousands of visits a day it must be a nightmare. I did find funny that I have had more spam comments than real comments.
Sometimes I feel the internet is run by spammers. On my site I get random comments also, hardly many well thought out comments. I am not sure how to deal with it, but glad to know it’s not just me dealing with it.
It is frustrating and the spam is something I’ve written about on my own blog. I think everyone can come up with their own policy of how they want to deal with it. Whether it’s like your idea of not linking to adsense sites or whatever. It’s probably best to state what your policy is, but even so, it’s not necessary. It’s your blog and you can do whatever you want with it.
Personally, I don’t care what site they link back to. Some of them are rubbish marketing ones devoid of content. Others are really interesting sites and blogs I enjoy. My policy is basically to look at the comment. If it’s a generic “very interesting” or “nice site” it gets deleted. If it’s a real comment referring to what’s been posted it stays. Regardless of where it links to.
honestly the only blogs I read are do follow…if I’m willing to read a blog and make an educated comment on it then why not benefit, even slightly? I don’t leave spammy comments and I have found a couple blogs I read on the regular now through this. I think its just human nature to want to benefit each other and the do follow blog accomplishes this. Glad to see you’ll be a blog I’ll be reading
I would call it spamming. Take me for instance. If i post 10 lines, i think that is some good content which could help you with the search engines. An outgoing link is really weak and doesn’t effect your SERP rankings, it is over talked. For all of my blogs i allow DOFOLLOW links, its the right thing to do. To have a reward for your visitors, especially if they take time out to put up a comment.
Rami
I would be interested to see where the spam is coming from. It might not be a bad idea for someone to make a plugin that ignores comments from people who were refered from a do-follow list.
Oh and
Thanks for sharing
true do follow does attrack a lot of spammers but as long as you dont care that much or can take the time to delete the spammers, you will be getting more traffic than if u left it as a no follow site. good things always have a price to pay o_O
i have comments disabled on my blog, partly because i want to build up traffic first, and partly to avoid spammers. i think jim’s idea of having a question about the article is interesting - sort of like a content captcha. you’d have to have a plugin or something that could help you add a question and answer to each post though…
I always open do follow on my other blogs to attract more people.. Actually only make money online type visitors would notice such things.
Do follow helps some sites but some sites don’t like losing the PR juice.
I agree with you completely. It’s very frustrating to have to deal with all those spammers. Personally, I’ll only leave a comment if the post I read interests me in any way. I agree with what one commentor said about Dofollow: “.. To have a reward for your visitors, especially if they take time out to put up a comment. -Rami”
Thanks
thanks for sharing!
:P lol… kidding.
it’s not all that bad though. sometimes spammers find your blog interesting and they start to read it regularly.
It’s too bad that the major platforms default to no-follow. If it were a perfect world, link juice would be passed around where it was deserved. Curse these spammers…it makes me so mad sometimes. Ugh…oh well, what can you do?
I’ve been reading a lot about the DoFollow stuff lately and it seems to be very high maintenance. After looking at dofollow sites on a list though they all seem to have a lot of comments, and mostly high quality ones at that. It would be good to know what the ratio of signal to noise is and how long it takes you to moderate it all.
Jim’s suggestion is a good one … there should be a captcha like plug in where you can set a question and answer about the post people want to comment on. I guess parsing the answer would be pretty difficult.
The so-called “dofollow” spammers are mostly humans … I have a big problem with bots spamming my comment form. Akismet catches those easily. I’ve been considering turning nofollow off, but I wonder how much time that would occupy, to moderate the comments.
Do you report spammy comments to Akismet as such?
Jakob,
I also found this blog through a list, but I also read the posts and make sure that my comments are on topic and very relevant to the post that a blogger makes. I am merely joining in a conversation that perhaps I would not have found otherwise. Sure many of us are out there for a few backlinks, but I think it is evident who the real spammers are. Hopefully plugins like Askimet and I believe there is another available called LinkLove that you can set some prerequisites to you follows. Pretty nice plugin that I read about on another blog. I think I will be enabling that plugin on my blog as it will filter out the spammers by just the fact that their one spam post will not get them a follow. It will allow the post but have a no follow :) Good way to combat against the bs comments that spammers will put to try to get a link.
I think that even though many bloggers are out to get back links from do-follow blogs… it also, like you mentioned, brings many more visitors to your blog. Assuming that the majority of them read your blog… it’s not a bad exchange. You get your message across to more viewers and they get a link back to their website.
That is a very good point. I guess it is a little sacrifice to get the comments.
This things do happen because they are lots of internet marketers who have no time to think of a valuable comment and want to quickly build lots of links.
But they also need to understand that comment on blogs doesn’t only just serve as a purpose of building link. Commenting on blogs have 3 purposes:
1. Build links: This is a most popular purpose and the most lousy way of using blog commenting. This method takes months to finally get traffic and if they need 5 minutes to do this kind of commenting, they spend 8 hours and 20 minutes(500 minutes) to get 100 links. Building links like this is a dumb way to market site.
2. Add-on something the blog writes to get the attention of blog readers and owners. When people write something that add up to what is in the post and make it more complete. Blog owners and readers will feel that there’s an expert here. They want to know who is this and see what he offer or provide. This is more efficient than just writing “Thanks for your post!”
3. Build relationship with blog owners. If blog owner sees you comment often, they will start to have a relationship with you and might even come to your blog often and consider to recommend it to other readers or write a review about it.
I think this is the right way to get traffic by commenting and wish this will hit on all bloggers so you can get the traffic and readers will get more value!
hey jakop!
you are complity right, that spammers are destroing the sense of blogging in unsing it for their business. Specially if they destroy any discussion with senseless comments….but I also like the follows, because it’s more than interesting to see, who’s the person behind the comment! in this way I discovered a lot of new pages…..hopefully your “personal” check will bann this guys!
the best greetings from germany! sorry for my bad english!
sebastian
yes I found you from a do-follow list and it has it’s problems but in the end it’s a way for the little guys to be able to compete with the mamoth blogs out there. And personally I need an easier way to find blogs that will benefit me in some way, either through knowledge, entertainment or backlinks. Also I like supporting the up and comers who offer good content. Really BoingBoing or LifeHacker don’t need my traffic. I still think it’s a win-win situation.