Back on My Soap-box About Do-Follow and Spam

Do-Follow the popular movement that disables the default WordPress “nofollow” setting for comments does attract comment spam. I know, I’ve blogged about this before but I have to get up on my soap-box one time with a little new information.

New findings

I’ve been monitoring the comment spam coming into my site since a previous post regarding “fringe spam” and here is what I found:

Of the 100% of the comment spam coming since that post, 70% shows up under my original post about joining the do-follow movement. The remaining 30% is somewhat scattered but most of appears under a previous post doing a self-assessment of what’s wrong with my blog.

I’m not completely certain how comments spammers are finding do-follow participating blogs but I suspect they have preprogrammed bots crawling the web for references to do-follow etc. Of course I could combat these bots by removing all references to the do-follow movement from my site; however, the effort to make that change might be more than the effort required to keep comment spam at bay.

Join the movement but be careful how loudly you announce your participation

Despite my dilemma I still recommend participation in the do-follow movement but highly recommend to anyone just joining the movement to carefully consider how much they say about their participation. A graphic image showing support without linking to any particular post tells readers a particular blog supports the cause but won’t be something easily discovered by a bot. When you join the movement, and I hope you do, be creative about how you communicate your participation. Tell your readers, just don’t tell the bots.