Comment Spam – The “No Follow” saga
Over 2 weeks ago, Google took the lead in an Internet-wide effort to curb comment spam particularly among blogs. Comment spam are comments left by certain spineless webmasters that add nothing of value to the post in discussion. E.g. visit my poker site which I’ve been getting almost daily lately. For my newsletter subscribers who’ve read my Trackback Explained report, you’ll understand better why this drastic measure was taken. For those who haven’t, well in a nutshell, by leaving comments or trackbacks with links back to your site on other people’s blogs you’re in effect ‘tricking’ search engines to look like you have a lot of sites linking to you. Those who read my report will also know, spamming is something I’ve emphasized as an absolute no-no.
Google’s suggestion was to get blog application developers to include a ‘tag’ into their comment links and that tag looks like this:
<a href=”http://www.site.com”></a> to <a href=”http://www.site.com” rel=”nofollow”></a>
this will signal to the robots not to follow and therefore give those sites a higher pagerank because of the number of links in. I’m not going to get into the discussion whether this is good, there are countless of discussions about that all over the internet, just do a search for nofollow and you’ll see. What does it mean to us marketers who are responsibly using this comment or trackback in the hopes of promoting our website? Do we stop commenting on other people’s blog completely even though we have something valuable to contribute? I think no.
Us marketers live for search engines. For good reason since they do bring a big chunk of visitors who can be converted to sales however, we shouldn’t forget people buy our products not search engines. Search engines help it yes of course. But if you continue to give valuable insight and contribute to other people’s blog, people will sooner or later come to see you as knowledgeable about a particular subject. So, don’t forget the readers. Search engines may not give you credit anymore but people can and do.
p/s: Many people don’t really understand what the nofollow will do to their blogs and think that this is a magic cure. I’ve seen many posts online where bloggers think just because they have the nofollow tag in their comments they are ‘safe’ from spam. Sorry it won’t stop spam at all. It isn’t a plug that stops people from commenting good or bad it simply tells search robots not to follow the link. So yes you will still get spam in your comments! If you really want to stop comment spam, disable comments altogether or, use the features available in your blogging application e.g. in WordPress I get an email each time a comment is left and I can choose to allow or delete. I think this works a lot better because personally, I don’t care whether search engines follow my commentor’s links or not especially if they are contributing, I just don’t want irrelevant comments period.
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Hi Lynette,
It’s me Zaki, we’ve met in Alice’s internetbasedmoms.com forum.
I agree with you that the nofollow tag won’t stop spam. In fact, I think this kind of ‘sweeping’ tactic will only hurt honest bloggers. I know that there are other benefits from trackback or commenting then for search engine thingy, like getting direct traffic, networking with other bloggers, etc., but these don’t make the nofollow tag as something “good.”
I think people shouldn’t follow Google’s stupid provocation of using the ‘sweeping’ technique of nofollow to stop trackback/commenting spam. Instead – just like you said – it is far better to delete any spam comment/trackback manually, because it is selective (contrary to the indiscriminate nature of ‘sweeping’) and it won’t hurt/still gives credits to legitimate trackbackers/commentors.
I think that’s all my opinion about this nofollow thingy. Thanks.
Regards,
Zaki
Hi Lynette,
It’s me Zaki, we’ve met in Alice’s internetbasedmoms.com forum.
I agree with you that the nofollow tag won’t stop spam. In fact, I think this kind of ‘sweeping’ tactic will only hurt honest bloggers. I know that there are other benefits from trackback or commenting then for search engine thingy, like getting direct traffic, networking with other bloggers, etc., but these don’t make the nofollow tag as something “good.”
I think people shouldn’t follow Google’s stupid provocation of using the ‘sweeping’ technique of nofollow to stop trackback/commenting spam. Instead – just like you said – it is far better to delete any spam comment/trackback manually, because it is selective (contrary to the indiscriminate nature of ‘sweeping’) and it won’t hurt/still gives credits to legitimate trackbackers/commentors.
I think that’s all my opinion about this nofollow thingy. Thanks.
Regards,
Zaki
Hey Zaki, good to see you here and thank you for taking time to comment. Unfortunately today most blog apps come with the no follow tag and what’s worst, I recently came accross a script that will pull other people’s RSS feeds to put on their website and then automatically insert a “no follow” tag on each RSS entry! Now that makes me MAD.
Firstly, many bloggers give people liberal use of their feeds and to deny the blogger some linkbacks in despicable. Secondly this is another good example of the ‘big guys’ doing what they think is right and pretty much imposing it on us. Now… it’s being used against us again. Double whammy.
I know you will understand this “Bila gajah berperang, si kancil yang susah” 🙂 feels like that doesn’t it?
Hey Zaki, good to see you here and thank you for taking time to comment. Unfortunately today most blog apps come with the no follow tag and what’s worst, I recently came accross a script that will pull other people’s RSS feeds to put on their website and then automatically insert a “no follow” tag on each RSS entry! Now that makes me MAD.
Firstly, many bloggers give people liberal use of their feeds and to deny the blogger some linkbacks in despicable. Secondly this is another good example of the ‘big guys’ doing what they think is right and pretty much imposing it on us. Now… it’s being used against us again. Double whammy.
I know you will understand this “Bila gajah berperang, si kancil yang susah” 🙂 feels like that doesn’t it?
Hi Lynette,
Thanks for the reply. I don’t know about other blog apps (since the only apps that I’ve ever used are Blogger and WordPress), but for WordPress, there is a plugin to disable the nofollow attribute, i.e. the dofollow plugin by Denis de Bernardy at http://www.semiologic.com/projects/dofollow/.
About the RSS-to-website script that you mentioned, yea, it is really mean. And you’re right about that ‘gajah and kancil’ saying, this war between black-hat SEOs, page generator users, and their kind vis a vis Google and other major search engines, is hurting many legitimate online business owners. I’ve seen people saying in some webmaster/marketing forums that their websites dissapear from Google or Yahoo, even though they’ve follow the rule – sometimes it is quite scary, like hundreds of pages dissapear overnight, ouch!
Btw, it seems that your Indonesian is better then my English, lol. I wonder where did you learn that language?
Hi Lynette,
Thanks for the reply. I don’t know about other blog apps (since the only apps that I’ve ever used are Blogger and WordPress), but for WordPress, there is a plugin to disable the nofollow attribute, i.e. the dofollow plugin by Denis de Bernardy at http://www.semiologic.com/projects/dofollow/.
About the RSS-to-website script that you mentioned, yea, it is really mean. And you’re right about that ‘gajah and kancil’ saying, this war between black-hat SEOs, page generator users, and their kind vis a vis Google and other major search engines, is hurting many legitimate online business owners. I’ve seen people saying in some webmaster/marketing forums that their websites dissapear from Google or Yahoo, even though they’ve follow the rule – sometimes it is quite scary, like hundreds of pages dissapear overnight, ouch!
Btw, it seems that your Indonesian is better then my English, lol. I wonder where did you learn that language?
Hi Zaki, where did I learn it? It’s because I’m Malaysian 🙂
Hi Zaki, where did I learn it? It’s because I’m Malaysian 🙂
Dear Lynette and Zaki,
Thank you for the information above re: trackback and possible remedies–even though I am reading it almost a year later.
I am completely new to blogging (I’m just now starting to put mine together using your material, Lynette, so nothing up yet.) and this information strikes me as important and highly useful–the ways around nofollow, especially, Zaki, your Bernardy dofollow link. When I get to that point, I will study it more.
What is the latest information on this issue? Your responses are important to me.
Thank you both for contributing to my web footing.
Beryl
Dear Lynette and Zaki,
Thank you for the information above re: trackback and possible remedies–even though I am reading it almost a year later.
I am completely new to blogging (I’m just now starting to put mine together using your material, Lynette, so nothing up yet.) and this information strikes me as important and highly useful–the ways around nofollow, especially, Zaki, your Bernardy dofollow link. When I get to that point, I will study it more.
What is the latest information on this issue? Your responses are important to me.
Thank you both for contributing to my web footing.
Beryl
Hey Beryl. Thanks for stopping by. No follow is kinda a ‘dead’ topic, nothing new has happened since but my views still remain. Credit should be given where credit is due and that includes credit for your blog commenters because they are adding content to your blog.
There are ways to turn it off though. Esp in WordPress.
Hey Beryl. Thanks for stopping by. No follow is kinda a ‘dead’ topic, nothing new has happened since but my views still remain. Credit should be given where credit is due and that includes credit for your blog commenters because they are adding content to your blog.
There are ways to turn it off though. Esp in WordPress.