Is It Time To Bo Do Follow… Again?
September 6, 2009
I recently wrote about appreciating your blog readers and suggest that it is safe to be a Do Follow blog again. That made for some very interesting conversation both on and off the blog. We all know that all blogs get spam and it is especially bad for those blogs that provide Do Follow links.
I explained that much of the problem was not so much from individuals leaving comments but it was bots that were the problem. There are many lazy link builders around and they are not going away anytime soon. There are also many paid link builders from low wage counties cluttering our blogs with useless comments. This problem now has and answer. When you leave a comment here you now must leave a comment of that is at least 150 words in length or it gets rejected automatically. I am calling this plugin the Scratch My Back Marketing plugin.
For the last six months or so I have ended each post stating that you must leave a 20 word comment to be considered for a likw. This was ignored everyday by link builders who visited the blog. So now, we have forced the issue. No longer will I have to waste my time deleting short comments that I like to call drive by comments.
I also use the spam filter Akismet and found that it was always full of spam. So much so that I dumped it all. I knew from experience there were useful comments in there but it wasn’t worth it to me to preview hundreds of spam comments everyday to find a few good comments. I know that I am not alone here. I am talking about 350 spam comments a day!
So after reading several posts about the spam filter plugin, Bad Behavior I had it installed. Then I took at look at the number of spam comments per day prior to using Bad Behavior. The spam comments on a good day were 113 on the worst day it went as high as 497. That’s a lot of spam.
The day before I installed Bad Behavior the blog had 444 spam comments. That dropped down to 16 the following day. I can easily deal with this amount of spam comfortably, in fact I now pull 3 or 4 comments out of the spam filter each day. Those 3 to 4 comments were being lost each and everyday. That is potentially 100 fewer comments per month!
Over the last two months the spam has been as low as 5 and as high as 32. Now, those are numbers that I can live with. This isn’t a perfect solution but it’s a reasonably good one. We have also included a 20 word comment requirement to obtain a link from this blog. We have managed to become Do Follow without the Do Follow spam problem.
Well, I then upgraded my plugins and Bad Behavior would no longer work with the newer version of the Redirection plugin. So I switched to using the Tan Tan Noodles plugin. This plugin turned out to be even better than the Bad Behavior plugin. It has absolutely removed all the auto bot spam. The only spam that ends up in Akismet now are from bloggers on our black list. If you have a WordPress blog you can blacklist email addresses in the Discussions area under settings.
What I am suggesting here is this, when we release the Scratch My Back Marketing Plugin it could be combined with Tan Tan Noodles and Akismet for a killer anti spam approach. It will then be safe to become a Do Follow blog. The reason that most blogs are not Do Follow is because of spam. These three plugins will provide your blog with lots of protection.
Is it time that you you went Do Follow?
We at Tucson SEO Solutions are officially requesting that you join the conversation here. That is, if you found that this post was at all interesting, useful, or perhaps you are just looking for a useful link. Then, I would like to entice you to comment by providing you with useful backlinks as part of what I call “Scratch My Back Marketing.”
We are now using the Scratch My Back Marketing plugin. This anti spam plugin simply requires that your comment be at least 150 characters in length or it is automatically rejected. It’s that simple. We are now forcing commenters to do what we were requesting for months on this blog! The blog also uses Keyword and Comment Luv. Please note that if you only include keyword your comment may be used put you will not obtain a link!
The Scratch My Back Marketing requires you to scratch this blog by leaving a useful comment. We then will provide you with an anchor text Do Follow Link. It’s all about win/win marketing. I am willing to exchange page rank for the bump that a fresh comment provides.
Are you ready to exchange comments for links?
This is the part where I move link juice around the site and hope that someone might actually want to learn more about our local small business solutions and venture further.
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Comments
15 Responses to “Is It Time To Bo Do Follow… Again?”
Got something to say?
I am using the plugin WP-Spam Free to filter spma comments and I am very happy with it. I am do follow, and do not have a spam problem at all. There may be some good comments that I missed, but I have never even checked to be honest.
Interesting post. From what I read on their site, it actually analyzes the delivery method, ( I assume that translates to “software scripts”). You mentioned the drop in the number of comments marked as spam, but what type of interface do you have to review the? I’ll read more in depth on the site and see if I can find it.
Keep us posted on how well it continues to work.
Bill’s last blog post..Article Plagiarism
Admin: I viewed this in Akismet. I was going to show the graph but it is created in Flash.
My blog has a dofollow tag, but sometimes it’s really annoying cause there are many spammers that just leave some link in useless comment
Admin: Wow, you mean just like that drive by comment that you left here earlier?
Do-follow blogs attract spammers and 444 is very big number to deal with , and I am glad that you found a way to deal with spammers and also reward your visitors with a link ,
Best of Luck
Regards
Gagan
.-= gagan @ Landing Page Optimization´s last blog ..30+ principles to a better landing page design =-.
Admin: This is one of the better posts that I have read this year… Thanks!
I admire how much thought you put into the commenting infrastructure on your site. As you said, you require thoughtful comments of your readers. In return, you provide an uncluttered comments section in which to interact with you and other SEO/marketers, as well as some link love back to your readers’ sites.
Your readers should also know that Scratch My Back Marketing provides a decent amount of referral traffic thanks to Comment Luv. Just make sure your blogs posts have engaging page titles to catch fellow commenters’ eyes.
What a great post AND marketing philosophy.
Installing the Akismet plugin was the best thing I have done in a while on my site. I’d much rather go through the spam comments and root out a few good ones than have to moderate tons of spam comments & trackbacks. I think the trackbacks were the worst – I would usually have 50+ every morning, and then get a few every hour. Not having to deal with that and only seeing the “Please Moderate” emails when there is a real new commenter on my site was definitely motivational.
~ Kristi
.-= Kristi @ DoFollow´s last blog ..Google Trends, Apple News & My New iPod =-.
There needs to be a happy medium between generating sincere, thoughtful comments and giving commenters a little benefit in the form of a link. It sounds as though you struggle with it just like many others (and I) do too.
My personal blog is awash in comment spam and I’ve been considering my choices. I use Akismet for Wordpress and it seems to work well, but I like your concept of requiring a comment of a particular length, which should weed out those “nice post” type comments.
From a business perspective, our company has been considering entering the social media sphere, however after some thought my predisposition to providing benefit to a commenter seems to be in direct conflict with truly getting to know clients, prospects and competitors since encouraging comments by those that do not fall into that group just gives me to sort through…
.-= Kelli @Control Engineering´s last blog ..Main Page =-.
Akismet ha proved to be very useful plugine when it comes to spams, for having installed “scratch my back marketing” Tan Tan Noodles pulgine one need to have that kind of traffic as well. suppose theirs only 100 visitor to one’s blog i think that such number can be managed easily but yes if you very popular in blogospeher and you receive huge traffic, in that case your recommendation is the most suitable.I think people who leave short comments are not interested in promoting themselves, nowadays bloggers are becoming more and more smart and yes the quality of comment speaks a lot about your blog so Spam Filters have a way to go.
Admin: Mike thanks for the comment. The whole idea behind Scratch My Back is that a quality comment might bring more than just a link. Comments speak very loudly about you and your business. I am a real big fan of working smart so I work on branding and networking while link building.
Its nice to see that we can control our spam comments buy this. There will be a huge change after removing all the spam comments. Even i will look forward to use this application for my blog.
Its so nice to get rid of those 444 spam comments.
.-= Jerry @ vintage wedding dress ´s last blog ..â��Something Oldâ�� or â��Something Newâ�� â�� A Vintage Wedding Dress Buyerâ��s Guide =-.
@Admin.. you brought up a couple of interesting and important topics in your reply to the previous comment. Branding is by far the most important aspect especially for the long term effects.
“Working Smart” however, is something that I believe goes to the heart of exactly what this original post was all about (this post and the one from last January). IMHO there are too many people out there that really don’t understand that concept. They confuse it with “working hard and fast”, hence the drive by comments, spam bots, etc. The list goes on of course.
Ironically, the whole situation was created by Google in the first place when they created the nofollow concept.
Putting the sheer numbers of comment spam aside, don’t you think it is our duty as bloggers and or internet marketers, to educate those type of people in the exact way that you do it here? Let your spam software take care of the majority of spam comments. But then show some of the posts using the editorial privilege of removing the link(s).
To me this is more productive to the community in the long run.
Thanks,
Bill
Admin: Well said Bill!
Thanks. It is truly how I feel. The do follow status promotes what web2.0 is all about… interaction. I just hope the driveby commenters actually read it, but, education takes time, right?
Bill
I don’t understand. Whay can’t people just install a spam protective program like Abakus instead of being a nofollow blog? Can your blog not be safe from spam with such a protective program?
.-= Jeff @ Colon Cleansing Food´s last blog ..Colon Cleansing Food =-.
This is an excellent article…and I really appreciate the brainstorming you have been doing to help all of us in this industry. It is very unfortunate that there are so many bot and spammers out there, and as a blogger and webmaster I can tell you it drives me crazy!
However, having DOFollow enabled is something that can be very useful.
Your article I think provides a perfect happy medium: Take advantage of the DOFollow, but make sure you are giving the blog an intelligent discussion point (articulated within 100 words). I am definitely going to look into getting this on my blog networks.
Thanks for the idea!
Excellent blog! Will be referring a lot of friends about this post.I�m going to bookmark this page so I can return and keep reading.Thanks for informative listing.I really like the tips you have given here.Keep it up.keep blogging.
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love your blog because you give me dofollow link.. thank for your kindness. I read your article and I get new perspective about blogging. Waiting your new posting.
No link for this comment from a link spammer!