I cringed when I read Eric Giguere’s recent post on how to build high PR back links to your site, one of the steps being that you find a DoFollow site and commenting on them. It reminded me of the keyword spamming I faced on this blog’s comments a while ago, and it irked me to no end. I tried to moderate the comments as much as I can, but at the end, I surrendered and removed DoFollow from my site.
The flip side of the coin is that having DoFollow on your comments does increase comments, and thus, traffic, to your site; new blogs can definitely benefit from removing NoFollow from their comments if they are just starting off and building a community around their sites. Having a Top Commentators list can achieve a similar effect, especially now with the hijacking issue fixed. Both the DoFollow and the Top Commentators options cannot address the issue of getting quality comments; I still have to moderate, and in small instances unfortunately, delete one-liners such as “I like your site,” “I agree,” or “it is beautiful.”
When I think about it now, I still feel that it’s a shame that I had to disable DoFollow on my site, because I really didn’t mind passing out juice to other sites that needed the PR. However, I spent too much time moderating comments, and decided my time was better spent posting on my blogs instead of filtering comments.
Check out my other posts: « LOL of the Day / Cool stuff — Googolopoly, BuiltWith.com »
As i read your post I began to think of a bunch of ways you can filter out spam (both manually and automatically). Definitely have Akismet installed, that will filter out the complete garbage. Also keep deleting the “one line” spam.
It occurs to me that we may be looking at this problem in the wrong light. By having the DoFollow tags you are probably getting massive traffic. The only question is how to monetoze it. The “spammers” like “get rich quick” product, try setting up some affiliate links. You may be pleasantly surprised.
Just my two cents,
Jeff
As you can see here, I don’t actively monetize this particular blog, but I do so on my other blogs. In any case, monetizing is an interesting way of “dealing” with it.
I figure that if you can’t beat ’em, you should at least try to profit off ’em 😉
Thats the problem with doFollow and Top Commentator plugins. You constantly get spammy looking comments that people leave to try to get some link love.
Its annoying because it hurts the regular commentators and people who are just trying to add to your sites content and discussion. I’ve noticed on a few of my blogs that this happens when you have the doFollow plugin.
You know what’s interesting though with Top Commentators list? Once I increased the number of people listed, I had less one-liners and spam-looking comments appearing on my site. It could be a coincidence.
I look at “DoFollow” as another criteria useful in prioritizing which blogs to comment on. It does often lead to spam, I agree. Ultimately it’s the blog owner’s decision of what works for their blog…
P.S.: It’s “Giguere”….
Sorry about that — fixed. Was so confident I got your name right, since I lurk on your site every other day!
I am still too new to the game. I have put in a top commentators list but not a do follow. Let me see. Havent yet had many visitors so, not many spams either!
I would still recommend that you try out the DoFollow option and see whether you can handle the comments flowing in. Just make sure you have some spam-catching tools installed in your blog as well, to be safe.
Will do. Let me see what happens. Since I have not monetized it, should not be a problem annoying the big G!
I have fallen victim to trying methods to raise my PR. I can say one of them was NEVER commenting on DOfollow sites. I comment on good sites. If they are Do Follow (as mine is) then that’s just a little bonus. The whole wave of dirty tricks to increase PR is pretty sad, especially when PR doesn’t necessarily indicate value (in my opinion)
Even with nofollow I was getting pill spammed to death and had to completely disable commenting on some of my sites 🙁
Keeping up with wordpress security fixes is depressing too.
Thanks again for the heads up. I am researching blogging for our website and I will keep an eye out for spammers with the dofollow and top commentator problems.
The web host firm may cut costs by providing less frequent customer support, resulting in more downtime in case of operational failure and longer complaint-handling periods. They may also lack technical support to help in developing web pages and modifications.