Blog Commenters: White, Black, and Gray

by Scott Jangro on 22 August 2007

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I am in complete agreement with the no-nofollow/dofollow movement in the blogger community. I’ve had the dofollow plugin on this blog a few years now. I love getting comments, and I think that an outbound link is the least I can do for someone who has spent time on a meaningful reply to one of my posts.

There’s a growing trend, however, of gray-area comments that have spammy link text and urls but a real or at least a real-looking comment. And while I appreciate any and all comments, in some cases I’m starting to feel a bit used.

I classify commenters into several groups.

Friends
These are the people I know, either previously or through their long-time participation on my blog and others that I read. As far as I’m concerned, these guys could get away with just about any link text, but I doubt that anyone in this class would abuse the trust.

Genuine
These commenters don’t have an ulterior motive within 100 feet of them. They’ve stumbled on an interesting blog post, respond with something meaningful, and … get this … don’t even put in a URL.

My Samsung DLP posts are loaded with these comments:

Can’t say thanks enough. You just saved me a lot of money. I watched in horror as my tv flickered one night immediately followed by a loud grinding that did not go off until I unplugged the tv. Found this web page quickly and took apart my tv to find that my color wheel was actually missing one of the panes of glass (broken).
–”Brad” – no url

Savvy
These are real people that I don’t know, usually drive-by or one-time commenters, who are probably motivated by the link to their site. They may have been interested in what I wrote, or at least were somehow moved to comment and will generally write something thoughtful. They’ll post a URL and the link text is generally something not very spammy. Either their name or a company name.

Great job on starting to work out. I just got back into it myself in April and couldn’t be happier with my choice, it clears my mind and keeps me focused on my projects a lot more. I hope you get the same results.
–Palm Coast, palmcoastsource.com

The company name might be there for SEO purposes, but it won’t be hair-raising competitive search terms.

Monkeys and Bots
I’ll put these two in the same category because the result is the same. Total gibberish that’s posted either by someone in a sweat shop or by a computer robot.

Wow!!! Good job. Could I take some of yours triks to build my own site?
Sveta, bonfici.org/lesbian-story

Very few of these ever get through the spam filters and actually bother me very little these days, except I do need to look through them to make sure no good comments got picked up.

Users and Abusers
Finally, there are those who walk the fine line of spamminess by using the goodwill of the blogger to allow search engines to follow comment links. These are ones who could otherwise be classified as “Savvy” commenters, but have crossed the line. They post something that looks real, or may even be real, but load up the name and url with spammy links.

but, what I have noticed is that Zappos is creating many duplicate pages by using these subdomains. As they list same products and content as that on main site. But strangely all that duplicate content ranks okay. hmmm
–Clarks, clarksshoes.us

This shoe guy has become a fairly frequent commenter, posting as “Clarks” and “Steve Madden”. Real names that may get by some bloggers, but as someone who promotes shoes, they caught my attention quickly. Vlad has asked about this same guy in the No nofollow, I follow, dofollow community on BUMPzee.

Sometimes they’re pretty good comments, like the above one. At least they seem like a real comment, but the more I watch them, they’re usually just repeating back what I’ve written about.

I’m inclined to let these go the first time at the risk of encouraging them.
But what if they keep coming back with the same sort of behavior?

And this is the crux of this blog post. What do we do about these guys?

Look the other way?
Delete them?
Edit them and remove the offending link?
Selectively no-follow them?

Is there a plugin that allows me to nofollow just certain comments? If not, do we need one?

Bloggers, what do you do with these guys?

  • Ah, yes you are right Scott. They don't know. It is unfortunate that they are not informed of this nofollow. This is definitely an interesting controversy on the Internet lately and has been intriguing to read people's opinions on it.
  • Scott
    Jason, most people probably don't even know what nofollow is and it's on by default.

    That's sort of the reason for the whole dofollow movement, to help people understand this.
  • So far, I've only had two "questionable" ones. Everyone else is obvious. These two guys link to a site that is actually moderately relevant, though, and I just left them. And the link is only through their name...it is just clear that they haven't really read the entry and are responding predominantly to the title.

    One thing that did tick me off a little happened yesterday...I'm in the middle of moving my site which is abundantly clear if you go to the old one. Some guy came to my site, presumably from one of the various blogrolls out there, and cursed at me for not following when I was a part of the community. I have seen a lot of that toward people who either have it set up wrong or follow for so many comments.

    My reaction was to leave the community with one blog and wait and see with the other. I do not know who these people are, but aggressiveness is not going to help the community at all.
  • I know exactly how you feel my man.

    So many people have taken the fun out of blogging all together. I remember back when you got a comment on your blog, it was actually someone speaking their mind about what you posted, but any more people just come by and do "drive by" commenting just so people will see their name, maybe click on a link and wind up on a page that is just full of all these products in which most are junk, or illegally sod internet marketing products.

    The worst part about it, is they usually dont even spend the time to make the comment worth a darn ....

    Actually thinking about it that's not the worst. The worst is all the spam posts that I get on my own blog that are nothing but links to sex toys and viagra, created by these commenting bots. Thank goodness for the spam plugins!!

    And if that doesnt take the cake, what about these marketers that cant even take the time themselves to actually post a comment, and they hire these people from other countries to make posts to blogs using their information.

    What was the net come too ...?

    Michael D Price
    http://michaeldprice.com
  • Scott
    Guerilla (or Brian),

    I'm with Andy on this. The fact that you use keywords in your post's link text doesn't bother me so much.

    Since you've put yourself up there as an example, let's look at it. Sure, it's keyword stuffed link text. But it's not that competitive, and it's a "real" blog with someone real behind it and not something that's apparent sole purpose is to grab search engine rankings (judgement call).

    Besides, an Internet Marketer blog is relevant to this one and to this post. So it "feels" ok.

    If this blog was about sex and pr0n, I probably wouldn't mind the comments with "sex toys" in the link text and comments from "Guerilla Internet Marketers" would probably just seem like that, guerilla internet marketing, and out of place.

    To me, comments are the best part of blogging, so I'll make time. The Viagra stuff never sees the light of day anyway, so it's the gray area stuff that I must make judgement calls on.
  • Brian, I am not sure about Scott, but you have an about page on your blog that clearly identifies you as a real person, and I wouldn't begrudge someone a relevant anchor link... unless you happened to make comments on 3 or 4 more "dofollow" posts in the next 30 minutes clearly identifying you as someone who is working their way down a dofollow list.
    Subscribe to comments can be used in all kinds of ways.
  • I think it's a tough issue. Now certain posts stick out like a sore thumb - ones with no useful content littered with Viagra references. Others may be tough to make a call on. Take this post for example, the name field is the name of my site, which also happens to have a competitive keyword in the name. Is this spam? Is this coincidence? Or is this a gray area?

    I think it all comes down to time management. If you are willing to put in the time to police your comments for blatant spam, then that's fine. If it becomes too much, then you may want to go back to the dreaded nofollow at some point when it gets to be too much of a burden that distracts you from more productive opportunities.

    For now, it's your site so you can keep on using your judgment! :)
  • Scott
    Given that you were searching for dofollow, I'd guess "savvy". Why not stick around and work your way toward "friends".
  • To tell you the truth, I found your site because I was googling using "dofollow movement". I have an idea in mind that I will not comment on post that does not interest me, either I could not understand the post... or I just don't have something to say about the post. Just like you.. I hate spamming comments.

    PS: I like your category... maybe you can tell me on which category I belong :D
  • It would be easy enough to write a "report comment" plugin, let the community comment and still leave it to the blogger to decide. This could help quite a bit with what I call "Daniel" spam-- that is stuff that we are all seeing but eventually realizie is spam. (Yet, somehow, we aren't sure the first time.)

    I'm going to be making another pass through my plugin. The hard part is never the coding, it's deciding what features are most useful, worth the cpu and worth having people spend the few minutes to "learn".
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