Posted 30 July 2007, by Aaron
This weekend I have been the victim of a wave of comment spam. In the space of 50 minutes one individual left a bout of comments. All were relevant to the topic of the posts although identifiable as spam as none of the comments were particularly deep or engaging - ie, one or two sentence responses vaguely agreeing or disagreeing.
More of a giveaway was the blatant keyword stuffing and the fact all of the comments linked to a commercial site connected to those keywords.
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.
My response has been measured:
- DoFollow stays for now, although I have removed Randa’s badge publicising it.
- I have published a comment policy and put a link next to the comment form.
For me this is a disappointing step as the main reason I adopted DoFollow was to encourage new readers to comment and engage. However, I now feel that displaying a badge is advertising myself to spammers, yet without the badge new readers won’t know that I DoFollow anyway.
My comment policy does publicise the fact that I DoFollow. And in the same breath it also demonstrates that I’m on the lookout for spammers and know what they’re up to. Whether or not the policy will get read and have any effect is another matter.
Is there a future for DoFollow?
I have to admit, I’m not as convinced as I once was. But the opinions of my regular readers - you - are much more important than the fear of spammers.
Is manually entered and seemingly relevant comment spam a problem? After all, it is relevant. If it is a problem, how do we solve it? Isn’t ‘rel=nofollow’ the best solution?
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Tags:Blogging, DoFollow, Spam
Glad you decided to continue following comments. A few extra minutes moderating is worth it in my book. It’s when the moderating becomes out of control that one has to consider what other alternatives there might be. I’m not there yet, so I’ll stick with the current plan, but I’m fairly ruthless with the link deletion.
From what I can tell, spammers do not really care whether or not a blog has nofollow. They just wants hits in whatever way possible. I get no less comment spam with nofollow that without it.
It really winds me up, why is it with everything the majority of people play fair, but you always get the minority of idiots who ruin it for everyone else? We end up having to make websites less accessible for the people who want to use it, passwords, approval systems, spam filters for these people.
I have certain key words, domains and phrases in a moderation filter now. It’s hard to catch them all but spam is the downside of getting your blog higher up the search engine list.
Randa - My moderating is by no means out of control, my levels of spam are fairly insignificant. So for now a few minutes moderating is no hassle at all.
Jake - Sure, spam is spam and it affects us all. It’s just DoFollow seems to encourage this paid-for manually entered comment spam which is tricky to spot as it is seemingly relevant to the post. The service Darren Rowse mentions explicitly targets sites which have nofollow removed.
Tara - There always will be a minority who ruin it for the rest of us. It’s doubly annoying when that minority profit from spoiling it for us.
Emalyse - When spam is entered manually it is normally relevant to the post topic so it’s so tricky to spot with normal filters. You’re right though - it’s a sign my site is doing well enough to be of value to spammers, and I guess that’s worth smiling about. 
I feel like the only real long term solution for this kind of problem is identity verification. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could control who comments on our blogs in a similar fashion to Facebook? Then we could adjust settings like only approved friends could comment or only approved friends could receive the do follow love. I know we can make people register in order to leave comments, but I feel like that is a much less likely scenario than clicking a friend request button. Perhaps people could have credit scores like the way buyers have ratings on eBay. We could automatically approve comments from people with high scores and reserve only low scores for moderation. Just dreaming for now.
I don’t publicise it, but keep dofollow on my comments. With the search status extension installed on Firefox it’s very easy to see whether a link is followed or not. If it’s not followed the hyperlink is highlighted in a trendy shade of pink.
Like Jake, I’m not sure if it matters all that much if you follow or not. I get a ton of spam in Akismet and, like Randa, I’m fairly ruthless at deleting dubious comments.
Justin - Some good ideas there. You’d need some kind of universal blog ID with universal buy-in… which is a dream… but a nice one
David - Trendy pink, eh? I know your type…
@Aaron: Well true you have to worry about those paid comments, but I really don’t care. As long as they contribute to the discussion and don’t link to an extremely spammy site, I let the comments stay.
there are people paid to do a dofollow hunt and comment on those blogs? @___@
that is sooooo low.
I guess it is worth to. Even if you lose as bit in your PR, it gives you the real feeling that people comment on your site. Isn’t this the final proof your blog works?
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Randa Clay
30 July 2007, 10:38 pm