DoFollow: Is This Feature Attracting “Fringe” Spammers?
DoFollow is the counter movement to the nofollow default setting for blog comments. Gaining significant popularity since its inception DoFollow sounded great on the surface but not everyone was convinced it was worth the risk. An escalation in comment spam was the primary fear, but anti-spam plug-ins such as Akismet have managed to keep comment spam under control. Despite the effectiveness of anti-spam plug-ins, concern that DoFollow attracts comment spam remain. Is this concern simple paranoia or a well founded suspicion?
Easy to catch the obvious stuff
Obvious spam is easy to filter. Adult content links, replica Rolex watches, and home mortgage offers stand out in the comment crowd and I believe that enabling DoFollow has done little to increase this type of spam. What I have seen increase, on my site, is something I call “fringe” spam and I attribute this increase directly to the enablement of DoFollow.
What is “fringe” spam?
“Fringe” spam is a comment that appears entirely legitimate, but has an air of generality about it. Such comments are easily placed into any comment thread and appear to fit the discussion. Unfortunately such comments add no value to the discussion, but they don’t disrupt it either. Such comments often appear as short positive phrases:
- Nice post
- Good job
- Cool blog. I’ve bookmarked it.
- I agree completely
- Thanks for the tip
- You rock!
What makes a positive phrase turn into “fringe” spam is the URL linked to the user name. If the link leads to a site of questionable content (adult oriented, replica Rolex watches, mortgage offers, etc), or a retail site, then it’s “fringe” spam. Whether such a comment is worth deleting is entirely up to you. And therein lays the problem with “fringe” spam: did the author mean it, or is it just someone exploiting DoFollow?
Still supporting DoFollow despite “fringe” spam
Despite the occasional annoyance of “fringe” spam I stand by my support and implementation of DoFollow. My site gets so few comments that anything I can do to encourage readers to comment is worthwhile. Real spam continues to attack my site, and Akismet hasn’t failed me yet. And DoFollow, in my experience, has done nothing to increase this type of spam.
Are you supporting DoFollow? If so, have you noticed an increase in “fringe” spam?
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Filed under: Blogging Related
A do-follower here as well, I must say even before I actually included do-follow I already had that kind of spam going on as well so for that matter nothing has quite changed for me.
I think it’s good to reward bloggers though by giving them the link back, especially for starting bloggers it might be a good way for search engines to begin picking them up.
Thanks for your sharing your experiences with the rest of us Slevi. I also like using DoFollow as a way to reward comments and giving back the link.
Thanks for the comment.
You know, I haven’t implemented DoFollow, and it is something that I think about doing a good bit of the time. I don’t really know what’s holding me back (since like you pointed out I’m not really worried about SPAM), and every time I think of it and consequently why I don’t have it, I feel like a very bad blogger friend. (#):(
Thanks for the reminder.
Nice post, man
Is there any possibility to tune Akismet to fight with those “fringe” comments?
Bush, you should definitely implement DoFollow on your site. You will, based on my experience, see a slight increase in “fringe” spam, but you should also see an increase in value-add comment which makes it all worthwhile.
Yury, great question about fine tuning Akismet. I’m not 100% positive but you can always add specific URLs to your own Blacklist in the options section of the WordPress dashboard and you can report suspected spam directly to the Akismet web site and they will do whatever it is they do to verify the spam and add it to their filter list.
It definitely attracts fringe and just straight up spam. Many of those phrases you mention are even just plain spam. Akismet has no problem catching those. If the comment doesn’t add some value and the link isn’t something useful then I won’t approve it. If it was not all that worthwhile and the link was to a related actually useful site I would approve it.
But 95% of the time the comment is linked to some obviously spam worthy site (most of the time they try to put in some SEO gamed keywords even though I clearly say - “Name (this is for a person’s name, if a person’s name is not entered the comment is not likely to be approved)”). Obviously those are not from someone reading the blog and wanting to add a comment - they are only adding a comment to get a link to their site selling on some topic that is constantly spammed about.
I’m thinking of implementing Akismet on my blog. It’s relatively new, but there’s already been a bruteforce form submit from a known spammer ip.
If you don’t moderate all comments before allowing them to be seen, you should definitely enable Akismet. The plug-in does a great job catching the stuff you don’t want appearing on your site. However, you’ll still have to be diligent about reading all comments and checking the URL to which the point back to. I’m still getting routine comments that read like any other normal comment but uses a URL that points back to some SPAM site. Be careful. Also, if you decide to enable the DoFollow plug-in also, I suggest you DON’T write a post about it. I have found that my post about DoFollow attracts a large amount of fringe spam. The rest of my posts don’t attract nearly as much.
Thanks for the post Carlo and John.
I also use dofollow blogs for posting. But it is difficult do differentiate that the particular blog is dofollow blog or nofollow blog.
Normally you can’t tell whether a site has dofollow or nofollow. If someone has turned on a dofollow like tool, they usually say so; however, in the case of my site, I have dofollow enabled but no longer advertise it. I found telling the world I dofollow was attracting all kinds of fringe spammers.
Thanks for the comment