I've turned off nofollow on my blog, and have had a couple of paid commentators leave comments. I know that one of the paid comment sites - buyblogcomments - says that they have a large database of dofollow sites.
However, I think that because I'm running a Blogger blog, it's less likely that I will have a lot of the comment spammers that you might have here on a WP blog...
MacBros
· 2 years ago
I've been lucky, and Akismet has been catching them anyway. A lot of them end up in Moderation too.
What I have found lately is the spammers registering in my WP Blog.
Tinu
· 2 years ago
I've been seeing that rise, but changing my DoFollow plugin to Lucia's Link Love has stemmed the flow a bit. Akismet catches them too. I put up a comment policy, but I'm also going to put up a share policy to reward those who follow the rules even more, since they now have to get to three comments to get a DoFollow link.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
· 2 years ago
Whether it has anything to do with dofollow or not I can't say, but my Nucleus blog has been under pretty heavy attack in the last couple of weeks. The majority of it has been robot generated rubbish so my guess is that it's probably not due to removing nofollow. There has also been an explosion of trackback spam too. These are all caught in a comprehensive spam defence net but it doesn't deter them from trying.
I've seen a handful of human spam comments but no major increase since advertising my blogs' status as dofollow. Genuine commentators are slowly on the increase and I hope that dofollow is a factor - after all that's what it's all about :-)
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
For the real spammers who were smart there were always 1000s of blogs they could find, such as those that linked to certain plugins.
People following the lists and the PDF that was published tend to leave lower quality comments and are less likely to get involved with a community.
The pro spammers are looking for low hanging fruit, sites that don't have moderation and spam controls.
John Hunter
· 2 years ago
I think they definitely are magnets but I don't think it is too hard to cope with. Akismet is great at weeding out most spam and the few individual human spam comments that get through are not tough to deal with. I also probably have fewer than most since the topic of my science and engineering blog often probably makes many go away. I would bet blogging related, SEO, entertainment, humor... blogs would attract far more.
Blog Strokes
· 2 years ago
Most large scale spammers understand that there is still value in a nofollow link, and that the effort of separately targeting dofollow blogs probably does not justify the effort.
The question you pose is a little different from that though, and is interesting. I honestly have dofollow on most of my blogs, and have seen very little non automated spam, so on the one hand I can't say that I've seen enough to judge, and on the other, the fact that I haven't seen that much, and have mentioned and linked to dofollow resources would tend to suggest that there may not be a tight correlation.
On the whole of it though, the most egregious manual comment "spammers" (I still don't like diluting that word this way) will be caught handily by spam karma, and the less egregious are mostly evident to the trained eye when the comment notification email rolls in. So I don't see a real threat here, at least not for WP bloggers who bother to use and configure the right tools. And I tend toward the conclusion that dofollow or nofollow have a minimal if not negligible contribution to the overall situation. I qualify this by admitting I've not done any REAL testing of the idea.
Scott
· 2 years ago
Thanks for all the comments.
I'd like to point out one distinction here. While people are certainly targeting dofollow sites with lists, etc., I'm asserting that talking about it on your blog, either in a sidebar notice or in posts like this one are attracting these guys more and faster.
Probably the most powerful weapon that blog spammers have is search engines as they look for blog finger prints, like commmon field names.
I've been using dofollow for years now, but have just got the feeling of an increase in the manual spammers activity here when I started talking about dofollow recently.
AndyBeard
· 2 years ago
I don't want to give any hints to newbie spammers, but there are all types of other ways provided by the search engines to follow new discussions on the topic without buying any tools, and the same tools for reputation management can be used for specific topics.
Reztar
· 2 years ago
Cvos SEO,
The site that you mentioned, if used properly, can give benefit and reduce comments that are not related. People like to comment on the blog's topics that interest them. It is less time to comment on the topic they like. At least with that tool, newbies can look for a specific topic instead of googling by just "do follow" keyword.
"""" Cvos SEO Aug 30th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Um yes. People like this guy facilitate comment inflation.
mlankton
· 2 years ago
Blog Strokes: I obviously feel the same way about people leaving garbage comments, but you are against people reading blogs that are a different niche than their site? That's going too far. So if I have a cooking blog, I'm not allowed to have an interest in and participate in discussion in, say, technology or SEO? The main thing is that commentors come and have something relevant to contribute isn't it? Who cares if the commentor has a sewing blog? Maybe their day job is in the area they are commenting on, or maybe they are just interested.
I guess maybe I do need to look into the first-comment-moderation.
E Lawrence Welch
· 2 years ago
"“Think about it, Wikipedia - with all nofollow tags - is technically saying they have no authorityâ€"
"Actually, this would tend more to imply that they are saying no one ELSE has any authority, since the authority attached to a link is directed at the receiving page and not the originating page."
You might have missed what I was getting at. When you write an article (i.e. Wikipedia) - you reference your sources (increasing authority) via dofollow links. When you don't trust the authority of a link - Matt Cutts suggests the use of nofollow. So, what I was saying is that "in a sense" Wikipedia (using all nofollow links) is saying they don't trust the authority of those sights they are linking to which leads to one conclusion - Wikipedia has no authority. So, what you said and what I said a correct...
Brent
· 2 years ago
I dunno....get a seeing the name of the last commentor (Las Vegas Realtor). It's tempting to use your target keyword as your name, and really I don't care if people do that. No skin off my nose, as long as the comment is on topic and original.
I would say that a comment that is original and on topic should ever be considered spam even if the motive for the comment is to promote a website. Who cares.
Brent
Crystal
· 2 years ago
Although I don't have a personal experience to add (my blog is nofollow), I would guess that most paid comment sites have do follow blogs on the top of the list.
"Most large scale spammers understand that there is still value in a nofollow link, and that the effort of separately targeting dofollow blogs probably does not justify the effort."
Is there value in nofollow links? I don't understand what could possibly be gained from it..
TS Travel
· 2 years ago
Yes - DoFollow is a spam magnet especially in some niches like mine, but my company's Blog will be with dofollow plug-in! I will just manually delete the spam comments. Yes - it's a lot more work, but we will have more comments and better community.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
· 2 years ago
Crystal,
'Professional spammers' stand to gain a great deal from spamming blog comments, nofollow or otherwise. The typical expert spammers, using robots to spam blog comments and trackbacks will target maybe hundreds of thousands of blogs. Some of those comments will stick, because many bloggers are too lazy, too busy or too inexperienced to moderate comments properly.
The sites that the spammers link to usually pay for every visitor the spammer sends to them. It's a numbers game and they are not looking to increase their results in the SERPS. They even get paid when a blogger follows their link to check it out before approving or denying the comment. It is just far more cost effective for them than legitimate advertising and as long as that remains the case they won't stop doing it.
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
· 2 years ago
SEO Expert?
You ARE joking right? Tell us you're just fooling....
If you're really serious, the DoFollow movement enables the bloggers that use it to pass page rank or link juice, usually to those commenting on their blogs, by stripping out the NoFollow attribute - which tells the Googlebot to ignore the links that use it. A comment on a DoFollow blog, therefore helps the commenter to build inbound links to his/her own blog.
seo expert
· 2 years ago
hi Maurice , be cool , i know that it passes the page rank , but why this blog does not apply nofollow tags, Because it also invites spammers to comment in this blog
Maurice(TheCaymanHost)
· 2 years ago
SEOExpert
I think it must be the language barrier causing us to talk at cross purposes here :-)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. I'm sure Scott does not 'invite spammers to comment on this blog', but he wants to encourage and reward genuine comments by using DoFollow - his question is aimed at other DoFollow bloggers, wondering if they have noticed an increase in spam comments themselves since implementing it.
If you're asking why doesn't he revert to nofollow if he is now finding spam a problem I'll have to let Scott respond himself :-)
Fox Tucker
· 2 years ago
My blogs stats package shows me that spammers are specifically searching for TypePad blogs with a NO NOFOLLOW statement, and despite my statement that I manually approve all comments/trackbacks, and the fact that I use the 'vetting box', still they submit their spam.
But, it's just a click of a button to remove it before it makes it on to my blog.
I'm a big fan of the 'no nofollow' movement. I'll continue to shout about it, and continue to swat the spammers.
Scott Jangro
· 2 years ago
What Maurice said.
I honestly don't think that nofollow is a good way to reduce spam. It is easier for spammers to do so indiscriminately than to stop bothering with blogs that use nofollow.
It does seem that some are seeking out the blogs that talk about using DOfollow. So I guess the lesson is that if you use it, don't flaunt it.
Slevi
· 2 years ago
Myself I'm simply using first-comment moderation, have been doing it ever since I began with the blog. I haven't really noticed an increase though after I began using the dofollow plugin, but it hasn't been long ago though. My main sources of spam are 2 entries dating quite some time back though which on a daily basis keep being bombarded, Akismet fishes most out but a couple still end up in moderation. Currently each of them is getting about 40 spam comments a day directed at them already and still rising.
Anyways, the first-comment moderation works great to simply fish out the spam. A minor wait for people which never commented before, but once they did they can just keep on commenting without any waiting.
jane doe
· 2 years ago
Yes, I have noticed. Although it seems to a) come in spurts and b) be mostly from India-related to selling phentermine or other diet pills. You know the posts where they don't even know how to speak proper English. "you blog is good. I like."
jane doe
· 2 years ago
Grrrr. my comment did not go through. Yes, I did notice a surgence of SPAM after I installed I follow. I got blasted a couple of days with a ton of spam comments peppered all over my blog. They were all from a company based in India selling diet pills. I haven't had anything recently.
Peter
· 2 years ago
Yes, I think that seo freaks search for blogs that mention dofollow in the hope that those blogs will actually will use no nofollow. I'm also thinking about if I should change my blog to nofollw. At least there is more traffic. I think there is some interesting software out there although I do not remember the name. There are ways so you can determine how many posts a person has to write till he/she gets a backlinks. I think this will prohibit the majority of spam comments.
Uncle Che
· 2 years ago
To me, it's all free speech. I frankly don't care if someone wants to come to my site, read a post and make an honest comment on it and put their website in the website field. I listed my site in a dofollow directory more than a month ago. I haven't had any increase in spam at all.
As long as someone has read my post and is putting an honest comment on it, it's not spam and is something I want to encourage.
reliable web hosting
· 2 years ago
I'm going to have to agree with uncleche. If a user comes to the site, reads the post and writes an honest response to it (not just something generic) then it should be no problem. I guess it comes down to, what's the point of the website field if you can't even post your link properly?
Maurice (TheCaymanHost)
· 2 years ago
It's also "ironic" that people try to game dofollow blogs, and justifies why the bloggers using dofollow are very wary of people just dropping one liners in an attempt to gain link juice.
Some people follow more than one thread on the topic ;-)
matt
· 2 years ago
Dofollow is good - personally though, I will stick with nofollow. It's just not worth the effort for me.
In saying that, if they write something relevant to the post that encourages more conversation (like a comment should) then what's the problem.. you get more conversation on your blog, more chance of visitors returning, and they get a link to their website.
Scott
· 2 years ago
If the comment is a good one, there isn't really anything wrong with it unless the link is totally spammy and I can't even tell who the person is behind it. Makes me wonder if the comment is even real, or written just to get a link. That happens a lot.
I don't want to have conversations with people who are just making shit up.
Ben Holmes
· 2 years ago
One interesting side effect of the 'dofollow' campaign is that you get more visits from other webmasters. I certainly would never have visited this site - indeed, would never have found it - except that it's listed over at Bumpzee - so now I'll be a regular reader here. There's obvious problems with 'dofollow', but I think that the benefits outweigh them. Spam will be with us always, but programmers are winning that fight, IMO.
Malignant Ignition
· 2 years ago
I would guess that the more sophisticated spammers are able to locate blogs using the "dofollow" attribute. It's a sad thing that these people waste time spamming instead of investing some time and work into generating an honest income online.
Bourse Goldman
· 2 years ago
I have the gut feeling that if you look at the numbers your gut feeling will be confirmed. Spammers can be very creative finding dofollow sites to leave links on and though I do believe that a nofollow tag will not stop them from spamming, I also believe that a "dofollow" mentioning will certainly attract them.
So I don't believe in coincidences.
Tino
· 2 years ago
Since installing dofollow on my blog - http://the16art.com - I have noticed a slight increase in legitimate comments. In the other hand comment spam went through the roof. With some spammers simply saying 'Thanks for the link', as if... I have now installed the math-comment-spam-protection plugin and spam went right down. A simple but very effective plugin.
Jeff F.
· 1 year ago
Is a DoFollow blog more lucrative to a spammer? Of course, so in a way, you are a more obvious target. You just have to have a good spam catcher, and keep a good eye on who, what and where the link is about.
I've also noticed an increase in traffic and comments, as well as more clicks on my ads. I'm glad I made the switch to DoFollow.
Perfect Wealth Formula
· 1 year ago
The Internet is a place for people to come and do what they want. The nofollow is a way of making the Internet not so free, and that isn't what it was meant to be like. I do think, however, that having dofollows does allow for more spam, but I guess you have to pick your battles.
MMORPG
· 1 year ago
Well I think spammers will always be a problem but that doesn't disqualify dofollow as a useful tool. I've found dozens of great blogs using DoFollow, many which I still read today.
Mr Diet
· 1 year ago
yes i agreed that dofollow a spam magnet. however we can minimize that, comments needs approval will help.
Omer
· 10 months ago
Sometimes yes. Even no follow blogs get spam, you need to have a powerful anti spam tool like Akismet for WP. That blocks out most of the garbage.
DoFollow Blogs
· 9 months ago
Human spam tends to be a gray area. A few of these mixed in with 20 good posts is okay but if every comment is those generic comments it gets frustrating in my experience.
All Comments
However, I think that because I'm running a Blogger blog, it's less likely that I will have a lot of the comment spammers that you might have here on a WP blog...
What I have found lately is the spammers registering in my WP Blog.
I've seen a handful of human spam comments but no major increase since advertising my blogs' status as dofollow. Genuine commentators are slowly on the increase and I hope that dofollow is a factor - after all that's what it's all about :-)
People following the lists and the PDF that was published tend to leave lower quality comments and are less likely to get involved with a community.
The pro spammers are looking for low hanging fruit, sites that don't have moderation and spam controls.
The question you pose is a little different from that though, and is interesting. I honestly have dofollow on most of my blogs, and have seen very little non automated spam, so on the one hand I can't say that I've seen enough to judge, and on the other, the fact that I haven't seen that much, and have mentioned and linked to dofollow resources would tend to suggest that there may not be a tight correlation.
On the whole of it though, the most egregious manual comment "spammers" (I still don't like diluting that word this way) will be caught handily by spam karma, and the less egregious are mostly evident to the trained eye when the comment notification email rolls in. So I don't see a real threat here, at least not for WP bloggers who bother to use and configure the right tools. And I tend toward the conclusion that dofollow or nofollow have a minimal if not negligible contribution to the overall situation. I qualify this by admitting I've not done any REAL testing of the idea.
I'd like to point out one distinction here. While people are certainly targeting dofollow sites with lists, etc., I'm asserting that talking about it on your blog, either in a sidebar notice or in posts like this one are attracting these guys more and faster.
Probably the most powerful weapon that blog spammers have is search engines as they look for blog finger prints, like commmon field names.
I've been using dofollow for years now, but have just got the feeling of an increase in the manual spammers activity here when I started talking about dofollow recently.
The site that you mentioned, if used properly, can give benefit and reduce comments that are not related. People like to comment on the blog's topics that interest them. It is less time to comment on the topic they like. At least with that tool, newbies can look for a specific topic instead of googling by just "do follow" keyword.
""""
Cvos SEO Aug 30th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Um yes. People like this guy facilitate comment inflation.
I obviously feel the same way about people leaving garbage comments, but you are against people reading blogs that are a different niche than their site? That's going too far. So if I have a cooking blog, I'm not allowed to have an interest in and participate in discussion in, say, technology or SEO?
The main thing is that commentors come and have something relevant to contribute isn't it? Who cares if the commentor has a sewing blog? Maybe their day job is in the area they are commenting on, or maybe they are just interested.
Good luck fighting the good fight!
I guess maybe I do need to look into the first-comment-moderation.
"Actually, this would tend more to imply that they are saying no one ELSE has any authority, since the authority attached to a link is directed at the receiving page and not the originating page."
You might have missed what I was getting at. When you write an article (i.e. Wikipedia) - you reference your sources (increasing authority) via dofollow links. When you don't trust the authority of a link - Matt Cutts suggests the use of nofollow. So, what I was saying is that "in a sense" Wikipedia (using all nofollow links) is saying they don't trust the authority of those sights they are linking to which leads to one conclusion - Wikipedia has no authority. So, what you said and what I said a correct...
I would say that a comment that is original and on topic should ever be considered spam even if the motive for the comment is to promote a website. Who cares.
Brent
"Most large scale spammers understand that there is still value in a nofollow link, and that the effort of separately targeting dofollow blogs probably does not justify the effort."
Is there value in nofollow links? I don't understand what could possibly be gained from it..
'Professional spammers' stand to gain a great deal from spamming blog comments, nofollow or otherwise. The typical expert spammers, using robots to spam blog comments and trackbacks will target maybe hundreds of thousands of blogs. Some of those comments will stick, because many bloggers are too lazy, too busy or too inexperienced to moderate comments properly.
The sites that the spammers link to usually pay for every visitor the spammer sends to them. It's a numbers game and they are not looking to increase their results in the SERPS. They even get paid when a blogger follows their link to check it out before approving or denying the comment. It is just far more cost effective for them than legitimate advertising and as long as that remains the case they won't stop doing it.
You ARE joking right? Tell us you're just fooling....
If you're really serious, the DoFollow movement enables the bloggers that use it to pass page rank or link juice, usually to those commenting on their blogs, by stripping out the NoFollow attribute - which tells the Googlebot to ignore the links that use it. A comment on a DoFollow blog, therefore helps the commenter to build inbound links to his/her own blog.
be cool , i know that it passes the page rank , but why this blog does not apply nofollow tags, Because it also invites spammers to comment in this blog
I think it must be the language barrier causing us to talk at cross purposes here :-)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. I'm sure Scott does not 'invite spammers to comment on this blog', but he wants to encourage and reward genuine comments by using DoFollow - his question is aimed at other DoFollow bloggers, wondering if they have noticed an increase in spam comments themselves since implementing it.
If you're asking why doesn't he revert to nofollow if he is now finding spam a problem I'll have to let Scott respond himself :-)
But, it's just a click of a button to remove it before it makes it on to my blog.
I'm a big fan of the 'no nofollow' movement. I'll continue to shout about it, and continue to swat the spammers.
I honestly don't think that nofollow is a good way to reduce spam. It is easier for spammers to do so indiscriminately than to stop bothering with blogs that use nofollow.
It does seem that some are seeking out the blogs that talk about using DOfollow. So I guess the lesson is that if you use it, don't flaunt it.
Anyways, the first-comment moderation works great to simply fish out the spam. A minor wait for people which never commented before, but once they did they can just keep on commenting without any waiting.
I think there is some interesting software out there although I do not remember the name. There are ways so you can determine how many posts a person has to write till he/she gets a backlinks. I think this will prohibit the majority of spam comments.
As long as someone has read my post and is putting an honest comment on it, it's not spam and is something I want to encourage.
http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/being-greedy-a...
Some people follow more than one thread on the topic ;-)
In saying that, if they write something relevant to the post that encourages more conversation (like a comment should) then what's the problem.. you get more conversation on your blog, more chance of visitors returning, and they get a link to their website.
I don't want to have conversations with people who are just making shit up.
So I don't believe in coincidences.
I have now installed the math-comment-spam-protection plugin and spam went right down. A simple but very effective plugin.
I've also noticed an increase in traffic and comments, as well as more clicks on my ads. I'm glad I made the switch to DoFollow.
however we can minimize that, comments needs approval will help.