43 Responses to “Being Greedy at Dofollow Blogs Will Hurt You.”

1. Income Hero (2 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 12:10 pm

   Hm… Now I’m afraid to leave any comment at all.. :]

   Although thanks for posting this, was informative, especially for blogging newbie like me.


2. Lucia on July 30th, 2007 12:23 pm

   @Income Hero,
   I intermediate on the “touchy” level. And I’m not sure if I can explain it, but I don’t mind “Income Here” here but “Cashmere Dog Sweaters” set my teeth on edge at my knitting blog! It’s partly because I can imagine someone having a nickname of “Hero” (which is actually a name in Greek mythology) but I can’t imagine someone having a nickname of “Sweaters”!

   Also… notice you didn’t drop any extra links? And your comment does relate to the content of the post.

   I suspect your comment would be fine with all but the touchiest do-followers. (And the truly touchy just go back to nofollow.)

   If you come back, you’ll notice “2 comments” when you make your next comment.


3. Tricia (3 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 3:25 pm

   Hmmm why does this post topic seem familiar? LOL I think I’ve talked about this on three of my blogs in the past two weeks or so.

   In last hour I got a comment from someone with a site domain garden.biz, name garden, who told me in their comment that it must be nice to garden since it’s so passive (not for me- I do extreme gardening!) and that they don’t garden at all because they don’t have time and wish they had the time. Yet their like goes to a gardening blog selling gardening stuff. Right.

   Don’t make a blogger feel that you think they are stupid when you leave a comment.

   If the person had said they had just started a gardening blog and a site that sells gardening equiptment and been truthful it wouldn’t have got my goat so much. Did they think that I can’t see their name and link?

   I think that’s part of what makes me so mad at these kind of comments and links. It’s like the comment spammers think we can’t see their urls or that they are just leaving a lame comment to get a back link.

   We are not dumb. Most of us click on the links that have been left in order to be sure we aren’t linking to a link farm or empty site etc.

   Love hit me too … yeah, you love my flowers, love the idea of a certain food etc .. that’s nice but why do you link the word love to your dating site?

   Then there’s Canadian flower company who links to the name flower and if they mention anything in the comment that says flower, Canada, Canadian, rose or any other type of flower it gets a link to their site. They’ve left one line comments with four links to their site!

   Those are just a few examples that have come in in the last hour or so. If I get 100 comments a day across all our blogs 25 to 40 will be comment spam such as this. I’m not even counting real spam comments that get caught in Akismet or that are blocked by Bad Behavior.

   I don’t mind so much if people link to their website or business type blog when they fill out the comment form if they are leaving a genuine comment, but yes I prefer that they leave a name and that they not add any extra links within their comment unless that link really pertains to whatever the blog post was about.

   If a link within a comment has nothing to do with my post or my blog, or their comment has little to nothing to do with the post I’ve been starting to mark the comment as Spam. I get enough comments that I’m not willing to spam up my site with those that abuse my do follow policy.

   Sure, anyone who knowingly visits a do follow blog is doing it in part for the link. We know that.

   The main reason I’m a do follow blogger and have been for almost a year is because I want to reward my REGULAR and LOYAL visitors. Not someone coming in with SEO links, and multiple links - Slam, Bam thank you mam. Uh huh.

   If you are visiting do follow blogs mainly for back links at least have the courtesy of finding a post that you can leave a REAL comment on and don’t fill it with links. If you can’t find something on that blog that you can leave a meaningful comment on - move on. There’s plenty of blogs out there that do and don’t follow.

   Oh and yes I said I’ve been a do follow blogger for almost a year. Do you know how long I’ve been ticked about SEO type comment spam? Only a month to six weeks because it’s DRAMATICALLY increased in that time. If there was a little bit here and there like there was before it might slip by (might not either), but I’m sure whether it slipped by or not it wouldn’t be as irritating as it’s become. I mean, look at what I said above - 25 to 40% of my “real” comments are comment spam lately. That’s abuse!


4. Lucia on July 30th, 2007 4:43 pm

   Yep. I see the same stuff!

   I’d mark that Canadian flower company as spam. No doubt.

   I’m actually getting more aggressive as I see more spam. (And I may write an interface that lets us “drill down” and see the previous 10 comments by someone who “matched” a name/ email address or url. That way, if we slip up, we can easily fix it!)


5. Blog Strokes (8 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 7:01 pm

   I’ll go along with this for the most part, and I commend you on a well thought out and considered position. It’s always nice to see someone sat down and thought it through instead of going with the knee jerk. I’d rather hang with someone who disagrees with me on something they thought out than some one who agrees just because.

   One very big reason I switched from Akismet to Spam Karma (I notice you use it too) is that I simply don’t want uptight Jane over at crochet-blog-monthly deciding who can post comments at my blogs. I want their behavior to make the determination, and thus far it’s worked beautifully. Though I will admit I have a couple of clever guys making concerted efforts to learn how to game the filters, and one even managed to squeak one through, so I was forced to implement my first actual blacklist entry.

   As for SEOing the name, this is new for me. My name is Dane Morgan, and since it’s your blog you could easily change my name, and if you told me that you just really didn’t want my comments without using my name, I’d honor that request in a heart beat, it is your blog, and that’s just the right thing to do.

   But I plan to make pretty much any comment on a post about blogging under my blogging blogs name now, which is Blog Strokes. I’ll still make niche / bum marketing type comments under my real name, until I launch my next blog about niche marketing, then I’ll sign those posts with that blogs name. Everything else, I would sign under my own name.

   This allows me to 1) separate these three facets of my online life and make them more manageable, and 2) actually leave a better link for both my blog AND the blog i commented on. A link to Blog Strokes with “blog” in the link text is more valuable to this post, than one to Dane Morgan dot com with “Dane Morgan” in the link text. Nothing on your blog is about that.

   Finally, I know it’s a little heretical, but i don’t consider weather a blog is do follow or not before I post a comment. I post based on weather your post leaves me with a desire to engage you in conversation. But as Andy will tell you, I’m pretty sloppy as links and juice go.

   Oh, yeah, Nice Blog, lol. No, really, nice blog, I was just a little afraid to say so.


6. cmanlong (9 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 7:42 pm

   As a fellow blogger who reads and visits lots of blogs on a daily basis, this is good information to know. I’ve never really paid much attention to the dofollow lists or whatever and honestly I’ve never heard of akismet. What exactly is it?

   Anyway, whenever I leave a comment I always try to contribute something to the discussion. I can’t say my comment will be as long or as detailed as the ones above, but they might be on occasion. Every once in a while if I have recently written an article on my blog related to the subject I am commenting on I will include a link to my article. I only do this on blogs I have visited and commented at before, and where I have seen precedent.

   Again thanks for the information I will pay more attention to my comments and the comments on my blog as well.

   later all and have a profitable productive blogging day

   Yours truly
   C “the C has to stand for Chow” man


7. Maurice (31 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 9:35 pm

   I got to this post via Bumpzee and the nofollow community and your comment title caught my eye.

   I have to admit that the names issue is one I had not given much thought to, and have often used my Christian name followed by my online identity as a “handle” (that being effectively the name of my site). I didn’t do it for this comment however

   I have never done this to game anyone, it was pretty much an unconscious thing, but having read this it’s quite obvious that some bloggers consider it to be “spammy”. To be honest, if someone uses something other than a real name on my own sites, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, unless, like the example already given, it was a blatant keyphrase. Something like Diane’s example above looks fine to me and actually makes it clearer what she’s all about. As I’ve often clicked on comment links to be taken to a place that is of no interest to me personally, don’t you think that sometimes an insightful name has its place and could be beneficial to other readers?

   As my site’s title is effectively my brand, I’ve often thought it appropriate, but I can see how this could be misconstrued. I’ve been blogging for a fair few years, long before all these issues were around, so, it’s not just “newbies” (hate that word) who might be a little surprised at how these attitudes have developed.

   Still, this thread got me thinking, and not just that perhaps some folks could lighten up a bit. I hate spam too, but tend to view my commentators innocent until proven guilty.

   Final thought - I use captchas in conjunction with forced moderation and it keeps me pretty clear of 99% of spam. Anything that makes it to moderation gets personal attention and edits if I see fit.


8. Maurice (31 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 9:39 pm

   I just re-read that and must apologize to Dane, for my stupid typo! It’s been a long day.


9. Blog Strokes (8 comments.) on July 30th, 2007 10:58 pm

   No problem Maurice. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I get called even face to face and saying my name to someone. Actually it’s improoved in recent years, but I think up until I was about 20 or so there weren’t 100 people who read or heard Dane on the first go.


10. Andy Sundstrom (5 comments.) on July 31st, 2007 9:36 am

    Phew, that was a long but interesting discussion (please don’t delete me I have more to say! ).

    I just added the do-follow plug-in to my blog about marketing and to a few of my other niche blogs too.

    I agree with what Blog Strokes say about SEOing the name in an otherwise decent comment. I wouldn’t really want to call that spamming. Here is my reasoning for that: If more people visit your blog and leave relevant and well thought out comments, that will actually help make your blog more popular, as you get more relevant content with virtually no effort on your part.

    As I have been marketing online for many years, I know that this is the same argument those who sold blog-spamming software where using. But you have to agree that there is a big difference between those “Hey, nice post - come buy some [insert your favorite potency enhancer here]” posts and those that actually contributes something real but uses an SEOed signature or name.

    Still, it must of course be up to the blog owner to decide what gives. Perhaps we should have an additional plug-in that clearly states the rules of commenting above the comment box? Then one couldn’t be excused “for not knowing better”, which I actually think is part of the problem right now.


11. Lucia on July 31st, 2007 10:33 am

    @Andy, I love every comment on this thread. Dane said two words that triggered a major thought for me. Believe it or not the words were “Crochet Jane”. I’d discuss this further, but the upcoming blog post pretty well covers the issue.

    @Dane (and everyone actually): SEO terms that are informational are fine with me. At this blog, “Blog Strokes”, “WebHosting” and even “SEO Expert” would be fine. At my knitting blog? NO WAY. (Longer explanation in the post!)

    @Maurice, I think the next blog post “Don’t Spam Suzy Homemaker” may clarify when your blog title might be spam and when it might not.


12. Lucia on July 31st, 2007 10:37 am

    @cmlong: Akismet is a Wordpress spam reporting service. Wordpress blogs can activate it. When the do, each comment is sent to “Akismet”. Akismet reports back whether or not it’s spam.

    Akismet figures out which are spam using a variety of methods. These include seeing that a huge number of comments are arriving from a particular IP address, or certain URLs. But the also rely on bloggers reporting spam.

    So, if you leave a comment and Akismet thinks it’s not spam, but I do, I can report it. If I’m the only one who thinks so, Akismet won’t call you spam. But if a lot of bloggers report you, Akismet will call you spam.

    After that, your comment will sit in all future bloggers spam folders. They may not see it. It eventually gets autodeleted.

    For this reason, doing things some bloggers consider spammy can hurt you– even if you think what you do is fine.


13. Income Hero (2 comments.) on July 31st, 2007 12:02 pm

    @Lucia, I still don’t understand, but that’s because I’m new to blogging and doing business online, WHY would you choose to “follow” links in comments area?

    Why just not save some time and energy making it “nofollow”? Does it provide you with something that I can’t see right now? :/


14. Lucia on July 31st, 2007 12:26 pm

    @Income Hero,
    I “follow” links for my benefit. I see at least two reasons:

    1) Following links does encourage comments. I like to read reactions to my blog posts. Reading the reactions makes me think more deeply about the subject; that’s one of the reasons I like to blog about topics I enjoy.

    2) Following comments by itself does attract new intelligent visitors to a blog. Initially, you get some visits by people who are attracted by the idea they can get a “follow”. If they find my blog attractive, they will return. This is the “upside”.

    So, giving follows in comments benefits me. (I could claim I do it for the benefit of my visitors, but I have to admit that’s just a beneficial side effect for me!)

    The downside is that some people have gotten the idea that they can swoop in and leave fly by comments containing almost irrelevant text and highly irrelevant links.

    There are others who are just sort of “pushing the envelop” and trying to see if they can get away with dropping a few stray irrelevant signature links.

    It is not my intention to lecture them on ethics. But I do want them to know they are wasting their time and, in come cases, hurting the ability to leave comments at blogs in general. That makes it more difficult for them to boost their SEO by leaving good comments on appropriate blogs that fit their niche. It’s stupid.


15. MacBros (3 comments.) on July 31st, 2007 3:46 pm

    Heh heh, I was going to be an ass and link my two sites :p but then my darn smart side of me convinced me not to.

    You make some very good points here, but I have to disagree with #5.

    If somebody made a comment on all 4 of my blogs, I would be more than happy that they did. I don’t think Akismet works that way.


16. Lucia on July 31st, 2007 3:54 pm

    @MacBros,
    Would you be happy if it was the same comment at all four blogs?


17. MacBros (3 comments.) on July 31st, 2007 5:14 pm

    OIC!
    Didn’t realize that is what you meant. But yea, you’re right in that point of view. Most definitely would hate that to happen.


18. rob (2 comments.) on August 1st, 2007 2:23 am

    Interesting post Lucia, as you know already I wrote a post on a similar topic just yesterday. I think the word is getting ‘out on the street’ so to speak; people are defin itely getting more clued up about how others will use them and abuse them to feather their own nests.

    Glad I found your blog, hat tip to Mr Beard


19. Simon (1 comments.) on August 2nd, 2007 4:24 am

    I think the message is great… Don’t spam… specifically don’t spam dofollow blogs. I was worried for a second there though. Is it good to give potential SEO/ non blogger / border line spammer types advice on how best to achieve their goals? Then after a second re-think I came to the conclusion even if their motive was bad, following these guidelines will force them to blog in an acceptable manner even if that wasn’t there goal. Or is the real motive to spread the word about the evils, hopefully making life easier for dofollow bloggers in the long term.


20. Lucia on August 2nd, 2007 5:32 am

    #Simon,
    I both want to spread the word about what’s happening but also to get the “borderline” people to behave a bit better.

    The real, true spammers aren’t going to stop. So, this isn’t written for them. But they are easy to deal with. Anyone who gets a comment with 10 pharmaceutical links etc. send that to Akismet!

    But the borderline people make everything more difficult! You look at the comment, some bloggers agonize over the “spam” button. Arguments break out when the blogger edits out links.

    But the fact is, the borderline people are going to get burned. They would be better off just curbing things and getting the link with their name. The alternative is getting banned by Akismet.


21. Vlad (12 comments.) on August 5th, 2007 8:12 am

    Lucia,

    I am so glad you to find this post. I have noticed an increasing number of such comments. Unfortunate thing that many of these comments are relevant. But I really enjoy those who even go as far as asking you a question. This is how I generally answer:

    “Hi Las Vegas Real Estate,

    What a good question……..”

    Being greedy will only hurt them in the long time.


22. Billy (1 comments.) on August 6th, 2007 7:45 am

    My name ain’t love and I don’t link to a dating site by commenting on your sock patterns. Excellent points on how people abuse link building.


23. Steve (1 comments.) on August 10th, 2007 6:39 pm

    Interesting thread.

    I find that, more and more, the spammy and even the semi-spammy comments stand out like sore thumbs when it comes to moderation time.

    And, as many people here say, just because someone submits a comment, whether it is truly brilliant or abominable sapm, you don’t have to accept it.

    So, my own rule of thumb is that, if I think that a real person has made an effort to sit, think and then write, I’ll use it.

    Otherwise, I won’t, and that pretty much has dealt with the spammers so far,

    Steve


24. Tyler Michael Jonsson (1 comments.) on August 14th, 2007 2:36 pm

    This is actually a very helpful and insightful post for new bloggers like myself.

    I will admit that I am eager to get the “link love” from any blog that will allow me to… But it is obvious that if I have NOTHING relevant to add to the post, that it is just hurting me in the long run.

    Readers will notice that your comments are not valuable and just a waste of time, and probably will not visit your blog then, or in the future.

    So the tiny SEO boost you get by having ONE more link to you out in the blogosphere is overshadowed by the fact that you are missing out on many potential readers by posting dumb comments.

    Good points!


25. Affiliate links in blogs - 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Forums on August 15th, 2007 10:20 am

    […] blogs very quickly. There has been a very interesting discussion recently over at this blog about comment etiquette and spam if you want to know more about some blogger’s views on acceptable/unacceptable behavior. Of […]


26. Blogging Secret (2 comments.) on August 26th, 2007 7:58 am

    Why you all still wanna dofollow since it’s very troublesome? I don’t mind to get remove, before you do that, make sure you think probably if you wanna dofollow, and the anchor text is really depend on the blog of the owner, my blog is bloggingsecret.com and I also have blog louisslim.com.I will put louisslim.com with an anchor text “louiss” or “louiss lim” instead of “bloggingsecret.com”. If my blog is bloggingsecret.net, of course I put my name as “blogging secret”, since my blog branding as blogging secret!

    If the blog about watch, why not they put anchor text as “Watch”? I just thought about it all the time, since I read this post, make me feel that dofollow and nofollow is still the same, the different is you let those anchor text with their name to drop a comment and linkback to him. If have 100 people name robin which have their own blog and 100 people of them drop comment on your blog, will you approve it?

    This just my opinion, I would appreciate if you give me some feedback, thank you for your time for reading this comment.

    Louiss


27. Lucia on August 26th, 2007 10:34 am

    Hi blogging secret// Louiss,

    Interesting comments.
    I do wish to dofollow, but on my blog, I will implement according to my wishes. As it happens, on this blog, the name “blogging secret” will be followed (provided you leave 3 comments using that name, the same email and same domain. ) This is done automatically by way of my plugin (Lucia’s Linky Love). So, you see it’s not difficult for me to dofollow in this way at all.

    As it happens, I do prefer if you leave the name “louiss” so I can respond to “louis” rather than “blogging secret”. It’s seems more conversational to me that way.

    And, honestly, yes, if you left a hundred good, decent comments from “robin”, I would do follow them! (I’d apply the same rules as for other comments. )

    Also what I am saying in my main post is not “I , Lucia Liljegren won’t follow your comments.” I am saying that some bloggers won’t. And if you visit a variety of blogs, or read comments on forums, you will find what I say is true. Bloggers consider their blogs to be theirs, and some bloggers will strip your link if you leave SEO in the name.

    So, if you try to push the SEO too far, you will discover you don’t get your “follow” links.


28. Andrew on September 10th, 2007 5:21 am

    This is an informative post regarding how to leave comments on other bloggers websites, without making your comment look ’spammy’ in nature.

    I’ll be back at a later date to read some of the other interesting posts you have.


29. Adam (1 comments.) on September 27th, 2007 1:25 pm

    Lucia,

    Great post. in my experience, most commentors fall pretty clearly under spammer or non-spammer, but there are some borderline people out there, too.

    ~Adam


30. Bape (2 comments.) on September 27th, 2007 8:37 pm

    Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.


31. Lucia on September 27th, 2007 8:41 pm

    @Bape…. I responded to you previous observation of the irony. I do follow, using Lucia’s Linky Love set at 3 comment. Look up. See Vlad with 6 matching comments? It’s follow.

    You have two comments now. Should you hit three, and return, you’ll see your comment start to follow. (Unless I decide you are spammy and delete. But you aren’t looking spammy. You just look like you are making hasty conclusions.)


32. Maurice (TheCaymanHost) (31 comments.) on September 27th, 2007 9:03 pm

    You might be interested to see this thread in light of the last comment

    http://www.jangro.com/a/2007/08/29/is-dofollow-a-spam-magnet/

    Drive by cut and paste dofollow commenting perhaps?


33. Lucia on September 27th, 2007 9:08 pm

    @Maurice: Yes. One of the things I plan is a sort of “drill down” feature that lets us see everyone whose comments got followed and how many comments they left. I visited Bape’s link, and I susect he/she is a person who is angry to be “duped” into visiting a “follow” blog that doesn’t just give follows willy-nilly. (That url will likely get stripped.)


34. Cindy (The 15 Minute Dating Blog) (1 comments.) on October 2nd, 2007 8:30 pm

    As for spammy comments, on my blog I keep getting a lot of comments with just “great post” and tons of links included. For some reason Akismet doesn’t pick them up and I had to manually file them as “spam”. Have you guys run into the same problem?


35. Lucia on October 2nd, 2007 8:36 pm

    Cindy: We all absolutely have a problem with these “great post” comments. What’s happened is that humans are hired to add spam. Akismet doesn’t catch them well.

    I also use SpamKarma, and I also always moderate if there are more than 2 links.


36. Maurice (TheCaymanHost) (31 comments.) on October 2nd, 2007 10:43 pm

    I can’t use Spam Karma but, on my NucleusCMS blog, I use a plugin called PHYFS (I won’t repeat what it stands for as this is a family friendly place) and this does a good job of weeding out the type of spam Cindy mentions - anything with more than 3 links is toast

    That number is set by the blog admin, so you can allow as many URLs as you feel is reasonable. It also destroys posts that are made from the same IP within a certain time frame - if a bot is doing multiple posts all within seconds of each other they get zapped as they arrive. The plugin also allows users to set up a nice sarcastic message which is displayed to wannabe spammers who break the user defined parameters.

    In addition to manual moderation and a captcha this keeps me pretty free of most spam, including the human posted junk.


37. bLuefRogX (4 comments.) on November 24th, 2007 7:55 pm

    I’d like to confess that I’m guilty of being of being a do-follow spammer, I typically find blog posts that they have the ‘I’ve just joined the dofollow movement’ and basically paraphrase the same paragraph over and over.

    I think I’ll stop that now


38. Klomand (1 comments.) on November 27th, 2007 1:31 am

    I-Follow movement, it’s a group of blogs (including this one) that have decided to remove the “nofollow” attribute from outgoing links on comment posts. When the nofollow attribute is present on a link it prevents Google and other search engines from using the link in calculating search engine rankings. Thus effectively the link has no value to the site that is being linked to. We think that’s mean.


39. Telephone Line Analyzer(new comment) on January 10th, 2008 11:31 pm

    Check out the name in the name field. Just kidding. Good post, but i have to agree to dis-agree. I found this site though a blog search engine, and pending the status of this post in 6 months (I will check) I will return to leave more of my very thoughtful ideas!

    I have practiced SEO for some time now and don’t think there is anything wrong with leaving keywords in the name field, as long as you follow basic SEO Ethics.

    I am very interested to see what happens to this post


40. Lucia on January 11th, 2008 7:01 am

    Telephone… at this post, SEO words stay. At my knitting blog, they get deleted.


41. PSX rubber stamp(new comment) on April 15th, 2008 5:01 pm

    i agree with telephone. people seem to get their panties in a bunch over the name used on comments. thats just stupid if the comment has real value. look at this. I am talking to you about your post of dofollow.

    Just because my name shows as PSX rubber stamp does that mean you are going to reject the comment? I mean sure you have that right, but if people whine so much about the name used I think they should just turn off the dofollow all together. think about this from an SEO standpoint. If a person wants to be generous and give link juice for a comment, then let it be for the keywords the person is trying to rank for.

    Now why in the heck would someone want to rank for Jim Thompson or Bob Erickson, or some other name? they don’t if they have a website that has products on it. So once again, this will be one of your longest and most meaningful comments to this discussion, so do you want to really dump it just because of the name you see?


42. Our Monmouth(new comment) on April 22nd, 2008 1:24 pm

    I think avoiding comment spam involves common sense. The whole point of adding a plugins like dofollow and commentluv is to encourage comments and interaction. To me its almost like putting your email address on your website while it is convenient for customers/clients it can encourage bad behavior. I got spam before I added and now Ill get some more but I don’t see a big deal in deleting it.


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