Comment Policy
September 10th, 2008
Written By: Adam Sussman
No-Follow has been placed on all comment signatures. Additionally I have gone through and purged all comments in the database that have keywords in the signature.
Future comments with keywords in the signature will be flagged as spam. If your posting a comment, use your name or create a nick name but do not spam.
September 11th, 2008 11:46
Good step on the keywords, since a comment shouldn’t be soley a justification for dropping your URL, preferrably with minimum effort, starting with “Great post”.
But nofollow? I think that’s one of the worst ideas google ever had. While I understand the purpose, to devaluate spammy links, many webmasters have gone crazy and rarely link anything without nofollow nowadays…which ruins the idea of a link as a recommendation of a website. Just my 2 cents…
September 11th, 2008 11:52
I much rather has a couple decent comments such as yours Florain than a hundred from people who are looking to spam keywords.
September 13th, 2008 05:14
if you put the dofollow in your blog comments you will receibe a lot of spam comments I recommend you to use Akismet to manage spam comments.
September 14th, 2008 03:44
Thanks for the information. It is always recommended that you add the useful comments in a “do follow blog”. This is a good way to promote your site and add value to other blogs as well.
September 16th, 2008 08:34
I’m sorry if I’m acting like an a**hole, but after reading this post, I couldn’t stop a chuckle of laughter.
Let me see if I got this correctly. Recently you have begun receiving a deluge of spam comments, apparently out of the blue.
How do I know this? Well, your blog was recently promoted on digitalpoint on one of those infamous “high PR dofollow blogs” lists. It’s how I got here.
This is why the “no nofollow” philosophy can’t really work. You can’t be a hero while mud is thrown in your face. You can only duck and hope that the bad people will go away.
My alternative was to use a top commenters plugin. Limited dofollow links and if someone tries to play archvillain Spam, you simply add him to the ignore list and mind your own business afterwards.
Best regards, George
September 16th, 2008 09:21
Funny to a certain point. It is a good thing I don’t earn my living on this blog. Since all those DP links pointed to me, and with me being a nice guy approving all the comments with spam signatures, this blog has taken a dump in Google. At time of writing this comment, I don’t even rank for my own name.
I trust Google will do the right thing and put me back to where I was before all the DP mess.
September 16th, 2008 10:11
Ouch, that must’ve hurt. Google has the grace of an elephant when it comes to this sort of things. I hope you’ll get back your SERP’s
Regards, George
September 17th, 2008 05:25
[...] target: the Shandyking blog. This one was a genuine dofollow blog at one point, but it backfired even worse . And the really sad part is that the blog owner got slapped with a huge Google penalty, the type [...]
September 18th, 2008 05:11
The action is quite impressive.. So honest and dominant.
September 24th, 2008 08:52
i hope you get back your rankings ..
September 26th, 2008 12:37
I’m not sure if google thought this would create a frenzy of “no follow” links or not when they instituted this. However, most people believe that if you link out to others your website will lose power. But thats not true . Google likes people linking out to others.
September 27th, 2008 20:06
That is good to hear that you went through all the comments to clear out the spam. Hopefully there will be less and less of it actually coming.
October 1st, 2008 16:10
I thought that the comments should be approved if they make any sense and are closed to the topic of the post.
Well, spamming is a thing that every meets when it comes to moderating blogs, forums….
October 21st, 2008 05:51
Yes, you have taken a good step, what about those who wants to contribute good information on your blog, i think they should get a decent link atleast. So, if you check that before approval, it would be good than removing do follow tag.
October 21st, 2008 12:52
Spammers ruin life for everyone (but themselves). It’s bad that you had to go to all the work to delete the comment spam. It’s bad that every link needs to be “no follow” to somewhat discourage the spammers (though in my experience they continue to post comment spam and forum spam even if the links are no-follow).
I, too, hope that Google stops penalizing you and let’s you get back to normal (minus the spam).
October 31st, 2008 09:07
It’s really an expected shame because “do follow” really helps honest webmasters and bloggers, but of course… like everything else net related… the spammers flood in.