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...
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
I would agree that dofollow links attract spam - regardless, the cost of nofollow links to the big picture of the web in the future is greater. Nofollow links completely foul up the concept of authority. Think about it, Wikipedia - with all nofollow tags - is technically saying they have no authority (according to the Matt Cutts definition of nofollow)... yet they continue to rank very well in SERPs.....what a joke! Anway, the spam is worth the cost..........
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.
Um yes. People like this' href='http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/2007/07/20/over-160-relevant-link-following-blogs/">this'>http://www.digeratimarketing.co.uk/2007/07/20/over-160-relevant-link-following-blogs/">this guy facilitate comment inflation.
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.
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.
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.
Could be, someone just posted a good ole' spam comment on your other post at:
http://www.jangro.com/a/2007/08/22/blog-commenters-white-black-and-gray/ ;)
Good luck fighting the good fight!
"“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...
Spammers will find you no matter what you do. My other blog gets spammed away and its just a regular blogger blog. I think comment moderation may be the only way to stop spammers, or at least get rid of most of them. Maybe have a setting to eliminate "me too" "great post" "awesome blog" type of comments right off the bat, because most of the spammer generally leave those types of generic, no value comments (at least, those are the type of ones I have received in the past).
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
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..
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/being-greedy-at-dofollow-blogs-will-hurt-you/
Some people follow more than one thread on the topic ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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I posted recently about the dofollow effort and I actually think the number of manual comment spammers has increased since then. I haven't counted so it's just a gut feeling.
Are spammers searching for blogs that mention dofollow as a method of targeting sites that are worth getting links on?
It wouldn't be easy to locate blogs that don't use the rel=nofollow tag (without building your own spider anyway). But it is easy to find bloggers who mention "dofollow" in the text on their site.
Has anyone else noticed such a correlation? It could be a coincidence.