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IN Blogging

What’s With The Spammy Comments? Seriously!

posted Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I started out with this blog being a do-follow blog because I believe in giving back to those who contribute useful comments. I can live with the fact that they might be adding the comment only for a link back as long as they also add something solid.

However, sadly most of the comments turn up being the ‘Thank you for this post’ type comments, while others don’t even bother with that and just copy an old comment that made it through moderation. Even worse are those that are not even relevant to the post.

No Follow to Do Follow to No Follow

Due to these tactics, a lot of do-follow blogs have decided to go back to being no-follow blogs. Although, this blog is still do-follow, I am seriously considering that option if the quality of comments keeps deteriorating. It can be very time consuming to wade through the spam to get to the real comments and sometimes they get missed out on or get delayed in posting.

What’s Happened to Akismet

Another issue for us bloggers is that Akismet is no longer working at an optimal level. It is letting through some very blatant spam. And when I say blatant, I mean adult related spam that should never get past any spam filters.

Thanks to the comment moderation option, these comments never make it to the blog. May be it is time to add another spam comment removal plugin.

Anyway…
….the point is that if you want blogs to remain do-follow and keep sending their page rank and link benefit your way, make sure to write comments that add something to the discussion. It goes without saying that please read the post before commenting.

  • http://www.truslerlegal.com Deborah Bradley

    Its sad that your resorting to make this blog a No Follow blog but why not just moderate the comment so that you can filter the spammy ones, I know its a hard task to moderate especially if you are having tones of comments coming in.

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    Deborah, I haven’t yet made it no follow but currently I am only getting 2 out of 30 comments that are genuine. Any higher and all I’ll be doing is moderating comments. So I’m going to give do-follow another chance for now.

  • http://www.stairliftguide.net jacob

    What gets me about spam comments is its like they don’t even try. You get all these generic comments like “Great Post, added to my Rss,” like this is somehow supposed to make up for the fact that there is no content in the comment and they are linking to some XXX site. Blows my mind that this eve still works.

    However, what is even worse is when you end up coming across a blog that seems to have good intentions and be a quality site, but they don’t moderate these kinds of comments away…

  • http://www.insurent.com/ Lease Guaranty

    I think you should put a stern warning just above the comments line instead. I think that will be a primary turn off to people who do that. Also spend a few days deleting such comments to send a clear message.

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    Sadly people who are going to spam will do just that. They don’t even bother to read the post and just make a general comment and in most cases a complete off-topic one. At least if their comment was relevant, I wouldn’t mind giving a link back.

  • http://www.dotsndashes.com Erum Munir

    And you can see by the amount of time I took to moderate these comments as to how painful the whole process is. I just gave up on them for a while there.

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