So, you’ve probably read about the new breed of comment spammers on ProBlogger, and maybe even have read Wendy’s post about why she felt she needed to turn nofollow back on or Chris Garrett’s latest post on the subject, and you might be thinking of turning it back on yourself because of some comment spam you’re seeing. Here’s why that’s not necessary for most of us:
1. Turning nofollow back on will probably not decrease your comment spam. You had comment spam before you turned off nofollow, and you will continue to have it if you turn it back on. The reason those of us who turned it off in the first place did so was that we had come to the conclusion that it was not effective in preventing spam in the first place.
2. Even if having nofollow turned off does increase your comment spam a little bit, isn’t it worth the extra moderation time? I place a high value on those who take the time to contribute to the discussion here and am glad to give them what little Google juice I can. Several extra minutes a day moderating comments is time well spent.
3. Ruthless comment moderation makes dealing with spam easier. I really appreciate Wendy’s extremely generous spirit and how she goes out of her way to research URLs left in comments to decide whether it should be deleted or not. As generous as I want to be, I just am not willing to take the time to do that. If a comment seems spammy, I delete the URL that was left, and have no problem doing it. It’s usually relatively easy to tell the difference. I sometimes will take the time to visit the site, just to be sure, but if I don’t have time, I don’t worry about it. If the person is not commenting just to leave spam, they will be back and comment again. Even if they won’t, I don’t feel obligated to give them Google juice just because they left a single comment. Besides, the amount of Google juice you get from leaving a comment on a blog that has nofollow turned off, even one with a high page rank, is not enough to write home about. (see this article for more info on how that is calculated)
All that being said, the problems that bloggers like Wendy deals with are on a much larger scale than most of us have to worry about. Even if one of the trolls gets multiple comments through on my blog and then redirects them to a nasty site, I can’t imagine it would cause Google to drop me. If I had to spend more than about an extra 15 minutes a day moderating comments, I would probably switch from using the Semilogic plugin to using the Link Love plugin, that sets a certain threshold for number of comments left before they are followed.
Here’s the bottom line: I guess it’s possible I’m being naive, but I just don’t think it’s enough of a problem to worry over for most bloggers. Moderate comments, zap the questionable ones and if a few get through… oh well. Tell me, am I being naive? Should I be more concerned?
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Hi Randa,
I’m not turning nofollow back on, but I think the issue is that this new buying comments service will be targeting blogs without nofollow.
From their nofollow page (link: http :// www . buyblogcomments . com / nofollow . php).
I think it is an attack against those who have removed nofollow as it is supposedly human entered spam which will avoid Akismet and such too.
Rather than giving up, we need to be extra vigilant now and discover who are writing the spam comments so we can block their IPs or use other methods to blacklist those working for this despicable company. We can beat them, I’m sure, we just need to watch even harder now.
@Phil – yes, we’ll need to be extra careful, I agree. I would be nice if someone would publish a list of known IPs that are doing this: the Comment Spammer D-List!
Links for 2007/07…
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软件的架构与设计…
I read about this somewhere else a while back, but I’m allergic to zapping them as I wonder if I’m inadvertently cutting off someone’s income!
Cheers
Good to get your take on it.
I don’t mind being extra careful to keep the link love going. It’d be different if it was taking up too much of my time, however.
@Mcewen – Cutting off someone’s income? I think you are vastly overestimating the impact of a comment on a blog.
@David – agreed. Time is a big factor in how one handles the issue.
I don’t mind sorting through a few spam comments, I think its worth it for those people who are making a valuable addition to the conversation.
What really annoys me is when you get a blogger who writes a good comment but insists on adding a link to an article on their blog that has no relevance to what they are commenting (so I just remove the link). I have no problem with people linking to relevant information (within reason), but this really winds me up.
@Tara – me too! That just leaves me feeling used, and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I really cant comprehend how manually entering spammy comments purely for a tiny amount of Google juice is ever worth paying for? And what about the person who gets paid to enter all these comments – how much are they getting paid? Its got to be the worst job in the world.
All my comments are moderated. It takes about two seconds to hit delete, so no biggie there.
At one point in time, I was getting up to 200 spam comments an hour. Referrer spam was strangling me. If I forgot to clean things out, in two days I’d have over 800 spam comments to delete.
Now, thanks to a different comment closing plugin, 95% of my spam is gone.
I don’t mind having to moderate things at all. The only time it gets out of hand is when I’m on vacation, and I now have a laptop that goes everywhere with me, along with a cable tie-in to my cell phone. Makes things much easier!
I’m happy to stay part of the DoFollow movement. At the moment I’m not plagued with spam – I have checked out sites that I’m not sure about, deleted ones that look spammy. I don’t think I would be likely to turn it off even if things got worse.
It begins to feel like a minor war against internet terrorism – I don’t want to let the spammers fear me into turning Do Follow off!
If some spam gets through, I’ll delete it. I’ve seen it sneak through other people’s blogs that I have subscribed to comments on – it’s no biggie. It gets spotted later and eradicated.
Bingo! Nicely said.
Normal antispam measures just won’t catch that crap either. Going back to nofollow will, however, eliminate those (once removed from all the “SEO Wizard” lists of do follow blogs…)
I threw in the towel last night and gave up. I don’t dread comments anymore (yeah, dread. I began to obsess over the whole thing and that’s just silly)
I’ve found a slight increase in trolling, but nothing major. Moderating comments from new posters usually picks these ups. The comments I really hate are the comment on a post followed by “oh .. and by the way, come and check out my new photo contest” .. which is irrelevant to the post itself. But I would expect to get these even if I weren’t an ant-nofollow fan
One thing that I have done was I made it so that if you have commented 5+ times it will remove the NoFollow attribute. That way, I hope to have people comment more often and have their comments mean a bit more. Sort of a reward system.
So if you comment 5+ times, you’re links from then on will have the noFollow removed
I moderate the comments manually so if I see something that is spam or pointless to the conversation I will remove it.
I think it’s a different story for different blogs. I don’t get hundreds of comments on my blogs, so it’s easy to moderate them and simply delete the rubbish.
On the other hand, if you don’t have much time to spend blogging, I’m sure you would rather be blogging than moderating.
But nofollow provides little protection against spam. Spammers don’t seem to care.
I’d love to have enough traffic to make moderation time consuming!
I’d have to agree with J. But the nice thing is that I’ve actually watched a decrease in the spam comments that I receive. I’m not sure that one relates to the other because traffic has increased since installing the do follow.
I guess I live for my blogs because moderating is no issue for me at all — I love to do it actually. I can’t image needing to go back to nofollow and it’s a bit sad to see that people have.
I agree completely. The only people that exploit do follow are manual spammers. The vast majority of spam is automatic and Akismet does a great job catching that.
[...] makes some really good points about the I Follow Movement. While it really irks me that so many people have chosen to abuse the generosity of others, I am [...]
I don’t think anyone could blame you if you did decide to turn off your Do Follow plug-in for the same reason folks like Wendy do it. After all, you’re a person that gives the link love through your top commentator section as well, so nobody can accuse you of selfishness or anything like that. You just have to do what’s right for you.
Regarding blocking IP addresses: I don’t think that’s the answer – mainly because that affects me! I’m living in China at the moment and I often get told that I’m in an IP range that has been blacklisted.
I’m sure someone in my IP range is doing dodgy things, but why should I be blocked because of them. Even if you narrow it down to a specific IP address instead of a range, I’m sharing a single external IP address with thousands of university students, so I’ll probably still be blocked…
So blocking IP address will also block some innocent people – I don’t think its the answer.
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IRONY OF IRONIES:
When I tried to post the above I got an Error 403 page telling me:
We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wp-comments-post.php on this server. Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity.
(snip)
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So there already is some IP filtering being done on your blog. The only way I can comment is by taking the time and trouble to use a proxy server to trick your site into thinking I am from a different IP address. I’m an IT professional, but there are others who wouldn’t know how to do this – granted you may not get many readers from China, or other blacklisted IPs, but you are limiting your readership just a little.
Um, am I missing something here? If I look in the source to this page, all the urls of the people making comments have rel=’external nofollow’ in the link!!
No that it worries me, but I’m new to blogging and have just heard about the I follow movement (haven’t joined yet but I’m looking into how it works and may do so).
I would have thought there would be no rel=’external nofollow’ in the link. Or does it work differently?
I don’t mind spending a few more minutes just to make sure the comments are clean. Bringing back nofollow never entered my mind.
@Stephen – the reason you’re seeing that many of the links are still set to nofollow is that I have my plugin set to remove them after a couple of days so that I have time to moderate the comments. Come back in a couple of days and take a look and you’ll see that they are followed. I’m sorry you have problems with your IP and that is caused you some difficulty leaving a comment here. I just installed the Bad Behavior plugin and am testing it as a way to combat spam, and I guess that’s part of it. I really appreciate you taking the necessary steps to leave the comment anyway.
I also appreciate the perspective of someone who may be adversely affected by IP blocking. It’s something we should all keep in mind as we try to manage this issue.
@ Randa… The Spam-list is a nice idea. I think I will bring it into the german blogosphere. I am also nerved of all that Comment-Spam…
I have just about the same amount of comment spam as I did before. I have opted to not advertise my I Follow policy so that it is a pleasant surprise for those who do leave a comment. I do think I Follow is a good idea.
It doesn’t matter if you have nofollow or not, because most of the spam is done automatically and the bot doesn’t know if it’s on or off.
Removing the nofollow is a way to thank your readers for collaborating on your blog. I turned it off a long time ago and i wouldn’t change this.
You guys are all missing the point. The problem is that people who take away the nofollow are to be targeted by the new buyblogcomments . com service which aims to write seemingly normal comments to appear to come from a website owner because they have bought them. It will probably go straight through moderation because it is not a bot but an actual person writing real comments. In that respect it can beat a CAPTCHA or any other method of blocking spam too. They will even be able to get through human moderation because it appears that it is a normal comment, and you won’t know that there are 100 other comments being placed on blogs in your niche too, in order to up the SEO of the site that paid for them.
The I Follow movement is at threat here because I Follow blogs will be targeted for this more than evil and incredibly hard to detect version of comment spam.
@Phil – you’re exactly right. Even someone who moderates comments very closely will not realize the comments are spam I’ll bet.
I was happy to find another blogger who did not panic and immediately go back to nofollow. I hand moderate everything. I do not reply on a plugin to do it for me, and I also strip out URLs if I donlt want to give the outgoing link.
Was not even aware of the “no follow” code, so glad to find your posts on them. I have downloaded and using one of your graphics and installed the plugins on my Wordpress blogs and edited the code in my Blogger blog.
Phill, you are right, nowadays we have to be careful with everything. Spammers aren’t missing anything, but still this is a way to thank your readers for collaborating.
This manual spammers are really hard to catch and get rid of them on your blog.
[...] Clay – The I Follow Movement is not dead Even if one of the trolls gets multiple comments through on my blog and then redirects them to a [...]
Do follow or No follow, comment spam will still be there. But for us who have turned off No follow, we have to make sure we don’t let this spammers get the link juice that they don’t deserve in the first place.
In my blog, I use Akismet to filter spam and moderate my comments manually. Sometimes, I do go through the queued comments and check for valid comments that might have been flagged as spam. But sometimes, when the queued spam is like almost 500 comments, I don’t have the time to go through all of it so I just delete all of it right away. Hehe
I’m probably on the minority on this, but…if a) the comment from the spammer is relevant to the discussion and b) the site linked to is relevant to the discussion…I don’t care.
Ayup, I said it…I don’t care if the evil spammers hit my blog (not that I have traffic enough to be worth the whatever-amount-of-cents they’ll get from spamming me) as long as it’s relevant to the discussion.
I use SpamKarma2 and it eats most of the spam that hits my site…I check the rest on moderation, if it’s not relevant to the discussion at hand, I kill it…if it is, I let it through.
On the other hand…if it’s relevant to the discussion, even if it’s paid-for, is a comment spam?
[...] is a new despicable service available where you can pay people to place comments on blogs for you, Randa Clay says that some people are turning their “no follow” back on again (including Wendy at [...]
Where on earth do I sign up??
The blog at http://start.deepdesigners.com is participating but I have no idea what do do after that… how do I add myself to the list?
[...] This has all the hallmarks of the kind of comment spam service revealed by Darren Rowse earlier this month. This kind of service has split the DoFollow movement with some feeling like their generosity has been exploited and others vowing to battle on against the spammers. [...]
[...] The I Follow Movement is not Dead by Randa [...]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that the actual ‘list’ has closed.
The list on my site has… yes.
Interesting discussion. I have commenting turned off completely on the some outside blogs that I don’t want to deal with, but have been using nofollow on my main ones with no real issues.
Agree with others who said you just have to be careful.
The I Follow Movement is great, and I’m gutted to see Google appropriating it for their own uses. However, they hold all the cards at the moment, and I’d rather nofollow my comments than risk a drop in rankings due to comment spam.
Hi!
We believe the iFollow movement is just starting to pick-up. More bloggers will realize soon that implementing doFollow will benefit them more.
I do think it’s a shame that people are leaving the iFollow movement for whatever reason – I believe that nofollow is insipidly damaging the blogosphere and the quality of searches for new material.
If nofollow was turned off by default then nobody would suffer this apparent extra targeting (which I don’t believe is as major as it’s suggested here, since most spammers won’t discriminate).
I wrote a rant on my blog about how I won’t use nofollow any more: http://blog.treasurelondon.com/?p=20
Is there some way we can petition blog software houses (WordPress, SixApart) to remove nofollow from the default settings? Ultimately I believe it’s in their interest to remove it.
I think the plugins already mentioned take care of most of the spam. Secondly, the effect of a single blog link is hardly anything. Add to that a service like Buy BLog comments is hardly viewed as white-hat by anyone, and you have a negligible problem, if any at all on r hands.
No, I don’t think your policy is wrong at all. Personally, as long as a commenter is adding to the site, adn he is not linking to a filthy one, I don’t see any problem with it. I have probably read 50 of your posts because of your policy, although I have only commented on maybe 10. I have even sent your link to a few friends. See how the do-follow has spread your message, and that’s just with me. I wonder how many more “me’s” are out there that have done the same.
I always try to leave very thoughtful comments. I read ALL of every post that I comment on. Why do some “do-follow” bloggers delete my comments? I would love to know. I have asked a few, but they just ignore me.
Anyways, thanks for the bit of link love, and your blog really is great.
I think that your bottom line “I guess it’s possible I’m being naive, but I just don’t think it’s enough of a problem to worry over for most bloggers” say everything.
Some people find it well problem and other not. It is on webmaster of his blog to decide what to do.
Anyway i see that for example Randa ask for well known ip addresses that may be blocked?
It is impossible because most of spammers use proxy servers where they change their ip address by each request /posting.
And they are usually subscribed to proxy sites who try to educate people about anonymity and online privacy and then abuse their proxy servers for their own dirty spamming game.
I definitely think this is the right direction to be going. It has clearly showed that blogs still having/using the nofollow tag is still being spammed. Just have some good spam protection and you’re all set.