Spam for Hire: The Danger of “dofollow” Blogging
Getting comments from users on blog posts is a very rewarding experience for bloggers. Often bloggers want to encourage comments by giving something back to those that comments. On Simply Basic I keep track of the months “Top Commenters” in the sidebar, rewarding commenters who contribute the most. Another common reward method is to make your blog “dofollow.” This means that links have ther “nofollow” tags removed and that the links help their search engine rankings.
The nofollow versus dofollow topic is a heated debate. I used to be a dofollow blogger but changed after I noticed a large increase in worthless spammy comments.
The other day when I was browsing through a freelance website I noticed something that was quite disturbing. Someone was actually listing a freelance position to help them spam dofollow blogs. That’s right, spam for hire. Here’s an exerpt from the listing:
This project involves downloading a software program…and using the software to locate “do-follow” blogs. I will give you a list of 200 phrases and I will need you to enter each key phrase into the program, 1 phrase at a time. The program will take a few minutes for each key phrase…to locate blogs with the key phrase. Then you will sort the results and copy the URL of ONLY the “do-follow” blogs to a spreadsheet.
So is there any doubt dofollow blogs are being targeted? Luckily, spam blockers like Akismet make keeping spam off of your blogs a little easier. But still, be carefull when making your blog dofollow, you never know who’s sniping your blog.
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This article was written by John Kolbert on July 2, 2008 and filed as General. Get the latest articles by subscribing to the RSS feed. This article, including images and attachments, is property of John Kolbert and is not to be republished or translated without prior written permission.
As a dofollow blog I see these useless spam comments quite a bit. I used to let some of them through when the comment actually was worth something (sometimes removing their link). Recently I have cracked down on comments. I still want to offer my readers the benefit of a dofollow link when they comment, but any comment with a link that is not to a personal blog is deleted. Since doing that I have gotten fewer comments, and I don’t feel the least bit bad removing any comments that don’t link to a blog.
Surely their must be a way to have a half way house here, to by default have comment links as nofollow, but to change certain regular and valued commentors links to dofollow.
dew
That is a good approach. Personally, though, I get tired of having to scrutinize every comment that comes through that closely.
Daniel H
Yes, there are a few out there. I believe NoFollow Free lets you set a limit so that comments become “dofollow” after they post a number of times. That’s a good method too, but you may end up getting a lot of “Thanks, great article” comments. But who knows, maybe would anyway!
Personally I’m fond of the top commenters. If you check theside bar you’ll notice they get a link to their blog which rotates every month to accomodate the newest top commenters.
John
The top commenters box could be abused since at the start of the month or early in the month (like now) a commenter need only comment once or twice to be in their. Obviously with other spam protection your likely to have to be specifically targeted.
Perhaps a nice compromise between all the methods discussed here so far, would be a plugin where by you starred any comments you thought where particularly useful, then when a commentetor gets above a certain amount of starred comments, their links get switched to dofollow.
Daniel H
That actually would be an interesting plugin. I wonder if there’s something like that available. It seems like a great way to let both the blog owner and other commenters reward eachother.
It would seem there isn’t anything that does this, which is odd since otherwise such a small thing has generated a huge amount of other plugins which can do just about everything else.