I believe fully in the “I Follow Movement” now 8 months after the whole thing started, and I want to give commenters the little bit of Google juice I can as a result of their link being followed from the comment area. However… I have to say I’m getting a little tired of the MANY, MANY comments I’m getting from people who put things like “Real Estate Atlanta” or “Best Web Hosting” in the name field. Most of the comments left by these people are clearly just intended to gain what they think is going to be a ton of Google juice from my site since it is now a PR6. They read somewhere on some site about how they can get “free PR6 backlinks” from the list of sites provided. Since the latest Google update this whole thing has gotten out of control, and I’m just getting a little tired of it.
It’s not that I don’t understand your motivation – I really do. You’re trying to grow your site/blog and build backlinks from high PR sites. I get it, but somehow that just doesn’t make me feel any less used and annoyed. I’m not the only one.
The thing is, you’re not really getting a PR6 backlink like you think you are. Yes, randaclay.com is a PR6 site, but each individual page within the site does not carry that same page rank. For example, if you left a comment on the most recent post the URL where your comment resides is has a page rank of 0. Google ranks each page within a site, not just the root domain. (this is how I understand the whole page rank thing based on my reading and research – if I’m wrong here, someone please correct me and point me to a reliable source)
Because of the large number of these kinds of comments I’m getting, I’m afraid I’m going to have to add to my comment policy that if keywords are left in the name field instead of your name, I will just delete the comment.
Also, I can’t emphasize strongly enough that this kind of link whoring practice is really not the best use of anyone’s time. There are much better ways of increasing the exposure of your site.
I took a lot of grief when I gave up on DoFollow… and I can definitely relate to how maddening those comments can be!
Clearly, you’re much more patient than I was/am! I was literally getting mad at those commenters — which is quite silly. When I get mad at silly stuff, I don’t do it anymore. Thus… I left “the movement”.
Hang in there — but if you start feeling too much negative on it, well, time to make some tough decisions. Changing your policy is a great place to start though.
Best of luck with it all.
I couldn’t agree more. I think the blogosphere (if I may use that hideous term) is waking up to it. My Akismet at the moment is about 70% genuine “nu-spam” comments, whereas 30% is traditional spam.
One of the worst is when I get multiple comments with different URL and Names, but the same e-mail address, but the absolute worse was this guy who posted with the e-mail address “spam.gospelrhys@hisdomainhewasspamming.com”. So, if I did accept is comment, he would’ve ignored me.
He must’ve thought I was chuffing stupid.
I know exactly how you feel, although I don’t think I get it on the same level as you. I hand moderate all my comments and always have to pause when I approve the comments with keywords in the name field. If people don’t stop abusing this, Google will crack down on it.
If the comments are genuine, what’s wrong with using anchor text of choice? In my eyes, someone should be able to choose their identification. On the web, if everyone goes by a first name/last name basis, you’re just another face in the crowd. If you use an alias or handle, nobody knows your real name.
As long as it’s not some lame ass comment like “good post!” then I am fine with using dofollow.
Randa – I am right there with you. Since two of my blogs are on many of the dofollow lists it is really easy to figure out commenters who are just stopping by for the potential link – especially since the two sites are so different. I have also created a comment policy similar to yours. I welcome the discussion, but would rather talk with a person rather than a someone named after a series of obvious keywords.
Char – The was a thread on Digital Point advertising that list! The amount of people who said that they’d “left comments on all those blogs” was quite sickening.
USEO – Commenting is a priveledge, not a right. A number of blogs have switched off comments and still been successful, as people will still read them. If you don’t like the terms of commenting, it’s simple, don’t comment
I also disagree with the whole “face in the crowd”. I get usually between 15-20 comments on each post, and I’d say most of them I recognise and know. Also, just above I clicked on Char’s blog with the avatar and the like rather than yours or Mikes. No disrespect to either of you, but I interpret as “wow, she spends time on her blog with an avatar, I’m going to click on it”.
It’s a real shame. I’ve been an ardent believer in nofollow and will keep it running on my blogs, but I know what you mean when you say you feel abused. I get my fair share of crappy comments and the only thing is to keep on top of them and delete when they come up. Luckily they’re easily identifiable, but it’s sad when people take advantage of something that is supposed to help the community.
I’ve started to get this same thing on my site. Which to me is odd since my page rank is extremely low. However I’ve noticed the spammers are starting to make note of the day the comment was left. To me that is a tell-tale sign of comment spam.
Randa, what do you think about the way I (and know David Airey does something similar) leave my name in the comments? Is something like that acceptable to you? I think of this more as branding (I was just LaurenMarie before I started my blog), so that people recognize me when they see my comments around the blogosphere.
I think commentors should use at least some kind of name. Otherwise, when the author responds s/he has to say something like “Thanks Really Cheap Auto Loans in Kansas City. I appreciate your comment.” Huh?? It rather takes the human factor out and it’s not really a conversation anymore.
And ultimately, it’s your blog. If you don’t feel like a comment adds to the conversation and is just there to take advantage of your generocity, I say by all means delete it. It’s abusive.
@Lauren – I think the way you brand yourself in your comments is entirely appropriate, and I might do the same myself if my site name was not actually my name.
@Mr. Utah – while I can see your point somewhat, the trouble is that most (I would say a good 90-95%) of the comments I get with just keywords in the name field are so obviously just trying to say enough to not be deleted as spam that it becomes much more effective to adopt the policy I have. Of course, there will be exceptions – I didn’t delete your comment, because you’ve clearly contributed to the conversation. I would be much more interested in conversing with you and maybe visiting your site and using your SEO services if you used some sort of name. Like Lauren said, it keeps the human factor present. I want to do business with people, not sites. If you left comments here with something like “Mike- Utah SEO” that would be entirely different.
@Craig – love your site, great design!
@Owen – yes, they certainly are easily identifiable, thankfully.
@Chris – those comments aren’t necessarily maddening to me, but when virtually every comment is like that it starts to be wearisome.
@Rhys – you hit the nail on the head with the avatar thing. That little bit of identification can really make a difference in one’s branding. Of course, not everyone uses the plugin that shows an avatar.
@Mike – yeah… no telling what Google will do next
It’s an interesting point and from what I’ve read about the DoFollow movement in the last few days, I think it’s always going to be a trade off between encouraging comments and filtering the time wasters.
I’m actually thinking about trying the DoFollow plugin on my own blog to see if it makes difference to the number of commenters there. I have read peoples experiments where they’ve reported an increase of 25% ish as a result. Like everything in life, it’s a value judgement you have to make for yourself.
Personally I think you’re doing a fine job for the DoFollow movement and I think your new comment policy is a preferable compromise to disabling the DoFollow plugin.
I totally agree. However, I would say that yes, you are right about the way PR is passed but if people read this post they are probably now going to just dig around in your blog to find a page which does have PR and post there. You might be better off removing that post, or at least the instrauctions on hown to actually get a better PR page to comment on.
Just a thought
Steve
Ok time to wade in here with my SEO Expert hat on… I’m modest too, huh? lol
And just for total disclosure, as I’m posting now in the hope I know what I’m talking about, I’ve changed the url in my link to my SEO company, not my personal blog, as this is no longer a personal kind of post, if you see what I mean?
Anyway, here’s the general gist of how Page Rank works. Randa is correct that all pages have their own page rank, not just a site. Of course it’s easer to simply say that a particular site is PR5 or PR6 as the homepage is usually the highest PR on the site (not always though).
There is also the implication that as you drop down through the pages in the site, the page rank diminishes as you go. So for a blog, a PR6 homepage may have PR4 or PR5 category pages, and maybe PR2 or 3 individual post pages.
Now to the issue of the little green bar. As most people know, Google only updates this every now and then, in fact they did a partial update last month for the first time in about 7 months (if memory serves). However, that does not mean that new pages have a page rank of zero.
Everytime the Google bot crawls a page, the page rank is recalculated. The difference is, that Google doesn’t bother to tell you that, the “public” page rank will not change till they do an update. Just to be clear here, the “update” or Google Dance as it is sometimes called, is NOT an update of Google’s Page Rank for your page, it is ONLY an update of the published page rank, which has the effect of bringing the publicly reported page rank in line with what they hold privately.
This is why during a page rank update, typically SERP rankings are unaffected. So it’s not true to say that these recent pages have a page rank of 0, it’s just that’s what Google reports, but secretly, they could have any page rank, and that page rank changes everytime Google bot visits.
I have the same issue with people using keywords in titles. The comment gets deleted/spammed.
I use the LinkLove WP plugin to only remove the nofollow tag after 5 comments.
Jamie
I’m guessing story links on a pr6 carry a better page trust weight within stories even if they’re greyed out in the algo… but that’s sort of the secret sauce of the internet. nobody knows. dofollow kind of depends on a commitment to active moderation, which a lot of bloggers don’t have the time for.
I’ve actually been wondering about this since I first read Courtney Tuttle’s article about the D-List. Honestly, I didn’t think enough people would expend the time and energy to comment for this ever to become an issue. I guess I was wrong.
I feel your pain! Ever since my blog went to a Page Rank 4 this last update, I’ve seen quadruple the amount of spam. I actually installed the Akismet extension for ExpressionEngine now along with a captcha to try and slow it down and it seems to be working. Knock on wood, but I’ve been seeing less and less and the ones I am getting are getting caught by Akismet.
Good idea on the comment policy change though. I definitely think you should delete the comments if they don’t have an actual name.
I guess I have a lot more patience than some or just don’t care. Maybe it’s because my blog is new and doesn’t get a lot of comments yet but either way I feel that anytime someone is talking to me, about me, even at me, at least my blog and company are being noticed. I commented on a bunch of blogs last week using virtual assistant as a name and the hits on my site were way up there. This week I haven’t commented as much and the hits have gone down so apparently not everyone cares what I call myself as long as I leave comments. I do try to leave relevant ones though, no good job types. :} Just my opinion.
I think it is ultimately up to you, Randa to delete the abusive comments. How did you set up your comments – do you usually moderate the first-time commenters, or do you display all comments right away? I think the moderation would work the best here, plus you can get an option, that the comment appears only after being successfully moderated before. This way you would eliminate some of those comments. Also, it’s a good idea to add the comment policy, so people know what’s expected and allowed on this blog. Good luck with this!
Like many others, I knew this was going to get out of control once spammers got ahold of the list. I’m just getting around to creating my own custom blog for my site and will definitely be including the nofollow attribute for links.
Well, it certain pains to see people abusing good concept and technology. Just announced the participation of “i follow movement” on my blog. Hopefully low PR blogs like mine won’t suffer from spamming. Anyway, I’m happy to know your movement although it’s 8 months late. I’ll persist and keep on searching for better alternative. Wish you all the best!
This is so true! I see the titles in my spam list and I wonder if these people actually think most bloggers are stupid. They must. I never even thought about putting my company name or other stuff in the Name field of a comment box. It would seem to me that in the long run it will come around as they say.
Happy Holidays! I hope things are going well with your pregnancy.
I feel you.
I have just started my new blog and i just suddenly started to get spam.
Go figure
The spam issue is exactly what keeps me from joining the DoFollow movement. I have considered it many times because I would like to encourage more quality comments on my posts. But in the end I never follow through because I don’t have the time or energy to deal with spam comments.
On another note, I tend to put my brand in the name field so that other bloggers can recognize me when I leave a comment.
yeah i can imagine it can get quite annoying, there are benefits to going dofollow but disadvantages also.
The problem that I see with people coming in off of dofollow lists is that they’re not the two types of people you really want to see come in:
They’re not people who will click on your ads
and
They’re not people who will comment on a regular basis
People who click on my ads, hell – I’m fine with them wherever they come from.
People who comment WELL on a regular basis are fantastic additions to your website. On another of my blogs, I have a reader whose comments are better than the majority of my POSTS.
As with anything, it takes a lot of dedication and effort to maintain the balance between the additional comments you’re sure to receive and the additional crap you’re sure to receive.
I do require that people put personal names in the name field – I got tired of spam like comments long ago. I also require the link be to a personal site or blog that is obviously written by them. And I don’t approve lame comments. I have no qualms about such practices. I encourage you to do the same. I see no reason to be hesitant about it.
I can understand how you feel. Maybe the only reason people dont understand this is due to the fact that your google PR6 is mainly on your domain which makes it the last post you put up. Only if you had a top commentor widget or best commenter widget then it would be different.
The PR would actually be good for them. Truthfully putting a comment for the sake of getting a PR feedback is so sick. Only if you do realy understand the mechanisms of it then only will it work.
I don’t know what we would do without Akismet. The mounting spam problem would be out of control if it wasn’t for these spam fighting scripts.
I would disagree on the quality of links coming from this blog however. Not all PR3 links (as you mention coming from some of your single.php temps) are created equal. Because you have such a high domain rank, your PR3 pages do pack allot of clout.
Is there not a plugin that will punt any keywords in the name field?
The script would have to have ALLOT of names in the array…
Brent
I guess this was bound to happen. Even I (with a lowly PR of 4) get a little Promotion/Spam on comments but it is still small enough that I can handle it.
Wish you Happy Holidays and a Very Happy New Year 2008!
I think it will be a better idea to ask those commenters to post up their gravatars & not to include their links in their comment
Google isn’t stupid
many no nofollow links are useless
You should add a CAPTCHA plugin to the comment form so that spam bots don’t comment. Try reCAPTCHA. Most of my friends find it extremely helpful in kill spam.
PS: I also dropped a backlink to your blog from my blog. Check it out. (Hey does your site have a moto, I put “fresh”, Let me know and I will update it)
I have to agree and disagree with this post. One of my blog sites also has a high PR and as a result an extremely high number of comments were being posted. 70% of the ‘Names’ fields were keywords and a comment such as ‘great site!’ Now I firmly believe that is someone goes to the trouble to post an informative post which shows the poster has clearly read the post then i dont mind turning a blind eye to the keyword name. Its the obvious spammy comments that simply wont be approved. I am happy to allow informative posts with the keyword name as I believe these posts can also add quality to my blog and help develop a community approach within the comments section. Basically if someone has left a valuable contribution to my blog then i’m happy to spread the love so to speak.
I can understand where you are coming from. Your blog, your rules. I will tell you that I have become an AVID reader of many blogs, just because of the dofollow. I leave relevant comments, which adds to the atmosphere that the blogger is looking for. The keyword that I normally leave (lsu coach les miles) is usually thought of as funny. I don’t see anything wrong with it at all. You get a bunch of relevant comments from me, and I respect you by keeping the keyword link in the name field.
Then again, your blog-your rules.
:O)
Hi Randy, I think you have to evaluate it on a comment by comment basis. I have many sites that I would love to get a link on. So as I’m reading a blog and I make a good decent comment, I sometimes do put in some sort of anchor text that is beneficial to me. After all, I am reading the blog and I am commenting on the post at hand. Couldn’t I get a little kickback for doing so?
I totally agree that if people are comment like “Nice post” or “Cool site” just for the links, you should delete the comments. I do the same on my blogs. However, if you have readers who follow the blog, what’s wrong with a little link love in a comment?
There are a lot of spammers out there. But the truth is there are genuine visitors too. Ever notice comments without links. I have. Some visitors link to there personal blog like me. But I also give a linkback to this blog too. Keep your chin up bro. and be happy cause Not everyone is a selfish moron.
Hi,
We’re about to launch a blog and I’m torn between no follow and with follow. The benefits of with follow ie. traffic. and on the other hand lazy posts. Still undecided ! Love the blog. Thanks, David.
Those people aren’t going to stop, and unfortunately, one day, they may force you to turn on “no follow” again, which will go and change every one of the thousands of comments into “no follow”.
It must suck to have to delete so many every day. I know when I was posting at OneMansGoal.com we got several a day. I had to turn on moderation JUST for that reason.
I agree. Once most of the ‘nice post’ comments are taken care of you get the benefits of additional traffic. I love the blog.. so keep your chin up !
I am sorry you had to go through all that crap. Above all other, we (bloggers, geeks) know how good the internet is and how better it can be and spam is one thing that we cannot simply avoid (no matter how much akismet love we have..)
Good luck bro.
Although I love the idea of my website being included in any comments I make, comments should only be made if you have something to add to the conversation. I would never hit a link of someone who only left a comment based on page rank, increasing traffic, or any other disingenuous purpose. I hope others feel the same way.
Lisa
It doesn’t seem fair does it. People try and do a good thing and others go and try to spoil it. I have been looking at some of the human verification plugins. They stop a lot of spam.
Who knows what future will bring to us, all users, all bloggers. I think its only a question of time to crack down on it.
I totally agree with this. Although I think nofollow is a bad way to deal with spam. By everyone giving and receiving a bit of link juice it helps to credit relevant articles/posts, and works by rewarding one another.
After all blogging is meant to be social. By turning everything to nofollow, it encourages people to read an article but NOT to credit it in some way with a comment.
I thijk nofollow should be used for new posters, or certain dubious anchor text rather than a blanket solution to the problem.
To be honest, I’m surprised that no one has come up with a good hack/widget WP plug-in that would allow plain name display for the purpose of conversation AND an anchor text link to be displayed as well. I’ve seen it done by hacking code before…but it would get busted with every upgrade.
I don’t have anything close to the level of traffic you do on my blog, Randa… so it’s always been my policy to manually approve all comments. The time expenditure isn’t that significant, and since I use Akismet as well… there really have been few issues, despite the fact that I’ve been DoFollow for quite some time.
But, I guess I’m really fortunate…because my name is Chuck Brown…and it just happens that my product for sale is “ChuckBrown-icles”…little bobble-head dolls that sit on your tabletop and tell you how you should think and behave.
Buy yours today!!
By the way…congrats on making the Smashing Magazine “100 Excellent Free WP Themes” list!
c-
I agree on your point of view regards to the whole “do follow” and “do not follow” saga.
There are many people who have not regards to personal grace and leave bad comments all over the place with keywords as name. It is getting outrageous and all thanks to money grabbing marketers who wants to game Google.
I am sorry that you have to suffer just an experience with your wonderful posts. Keep blogging!
Weird. I just today made a post updating my comment policy because I’m tired of the keywords. I just find it a bit annoying and it started to cheapen the comments in my mind. It seemed too much like the ulterior motive of bothering to make a comment.
I support DoFollow and don’t want to change that. Making a new comment policy regarding the name field seemed like the best thing to do.
I think it really depends on the comments though. Even if someone uses a percieved keyword, it doesn’t mean they are not reading the blog. For my blog or store I don’t want to reveal my real name, so I use Ghillie Suit Guy. I guess I could use a fake name like John or Mike but would that make any difference to the content of my comment?
While it’s great to follow links if comments are moderated against spam, my personal opinion is I would definitely kill all links which aren’t a company or a name as the author.