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First off: The introduction of real links in comments via the dofollow plugin has been a huge success, especially as I am ranking high for both “dofollow” and “dofollow plugin” in Google by now because my article about the end of conventional SEO was so popular and has been reprinted or translated numerous times including my “dofollow” link.
Dofollow encouraged participation substantially, moreover what most people do not mention in this context: It made this blog a really friendly place.
Commenters who also want a link rarely will offend you. So by far most coments are friendly, helpful and adding some new perspective, update or information. In short: People commenting on SEO 2.0 are truly contributing. In many cases I even rank for long tail queries that are found only in my comments.
Blogging is like inviting people to your barbecue party: They get invited and receive free food while you enjoy a nice get together.
I use Akismet for spam protection and thus have rarely problems with real spammers who let robots comment automatically on thousands of blogs. There are sometimes problems with false positives in case of people Akismet markes accidentally as spam. Aaron Wall of SEO book was flagged as spam by Akismet and one of my eager contributors david deangelo has been filtered time and again even after I made him a “member” of this blog. This is a bug that sucks but I will de-spam your comments if you contact me by email, my adress is onreact at onreact.com
Many people complain about so called “manual spam” which is an oxymoron in a way. Spam is an unsolicited message and if you allow comments (by people) you can’t call it spam in this case. Thus comments made by humans not robots are not spam in 99% of cases. Nonetheless some things annoy me too:
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People commenting with a name like “SEO Company” or “Real Estate California” because I want people to comment not companies or services, especially if the keywords have nothing to do with SEO or other topics of this blog.
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One liners saying something like “thanks, great article” because I don’t know if they are made by robots or not if they do not refer to the post.
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People who do not read the article but comment based on the title and it’s keywords because it’s just ridiculous to state “I also like three-way links” if I just wrote that I hate them.
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People using German or other non-English keywords as their “name” because it is impolite to exclude the majority of my readers who do not understand.
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Commenters linking to specific subpages like domain.com/my-new-product because I’m not your catalogue.
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People adding a signature in their comment because you already got a link, you don’t need a signature, that’s greedy.
- Commenters who disagree with me, because I never err you damn naysayers! ;-)
On good days I will just approve your comments, on normal days I will change your “name” to something which sounds actually like a name or remove your URL but on bad days I will spam your comment or delete it.
Spamming your comment means that you get flagged on other Wordpress blogs too so you probably do not want to risk that.
There are easy solutions or exceptions for most of these cases where both you and I can live with them or they even add some additional value. Tim Nash, a SEO consultant from the UK has a nice technical solution implemented: He added an extra text box for your favorite anchor text. This is really neat but I’m too lazy to hack my WordPress comment form and thus I prefer the easiest solution, introduced in part by my favorite blog consultant, Michael Martine. He just combines two things, his name and his job description.
So check out these simple rules of blog commenting netiquette, they might not apply everywhere but they will help you not be thrown out at SEO 2.0 and in other places probably too.
- You can write: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant. You can also link to to an about page covering you. Also if you do not want to disclose your name or job position, you can even write something like Bob of Miller Real Estate or at least leave your initials to enable me to address you: AJ of Miller Real Estate but don’t write Miller Real Estate, AJ. Imagine being on a party again: You say your name first when you introduce yourself and then you tell people what you do for a living.
- I appreciate people being thankful for a post but unless your refer to the specific post or I know your blog URL I have no way of determining whether you are a bot or not. So write something like “thank your for the post, it helped me with …”
- If you want a piece of meat at a barbecue you don’t just drop in, take it and leave the party instantly. Stay for a minute to read the post, say “hi” and then leave.
- Do you speak German addressing people on a party where nobody understands it? Try to translate at least. So do not write Web design Köln, but Mark of Dom Web Webdesign in Cologne
- Imagine yourself on a party when asked about what you do for a living telling people, “Dirt Devil M110002!” So, as I said above, a page about you is OK, your homepage vacuumcleaners.com also but not a specific product page. Akismet will spam you in most cases you use subpages anyways.
- A barbecue party is not a trade fair, you do not wear your name plate on your lapel. You just introduce yourself, that’s enough. So skip the additional signature.
- Now imagine someone entering a barbecue party shouting: This place sucks, meat is murder, you dirty bastards stink! I guess such a person gets thrown out immediately. If you disagree, do it politely, with style after at least reading what this site is about. Of course I will delete trolls who offend me for all “SEOs being spammers“.
Did I forget something? Probably, feel free to add your take on the subject of blog commenting netiquette an barbecue parties in the comments below ;-) Introduce yourself and be nice to the other guest.
This thing has 40 Comments
Your commenting netiquette list has some good common sense pieces of advice any commenter should follow on any blog.
What I’d add is “Add something to the conversation!”. Point #4 from the netiquette list is getting there, but I really think you need to add some value with your comment to show your not just there for a link.
I do relate to the part about commentators using a different language than the one you post in. It happens less often right now, but it was a real pain before to see comments in Romanian that other readers could not understand. I had no time to translate, so I replied in English, hoping i could also summarize the comment in Romanian. I also kindly asked those using Romanian to try English. it was obvious they knew the language if they understood the post :)
Paul: This is true but I do not expect anybody to do that much. In fact I want to keep it as low-threshold as possible. If someone is gracious s/he should be allowed to express it.
Alina: In my case I refer even to the sheer name, if it’s a German keyword it’s even more rude. Imagine someone from Germany coming to your party and not even saying his name.
This is JF at 365questions :
I noticed recently that I was receiving hand crafted spam almost everyday. Sometimes it was even a bit hard to know if it was even spam, (not when the guy’s name is “Property sale” obviously) like when it was coming from niche blogs with phony author profiles for example.
In doubt, I would let the comment go through but remove the link… And if the comment was just really no value, I would delete it.
Now I was wondering I might have appeared on a list of “do follow” blogs. I found some for sale, sorted by page rank. I Just couldn’t find one with my blog…
Anyway, when you don’t keep the link, they just stop coming ..)
I recently disabled the dofollow, and as a consequence now get less spam. Weird.
Spot on list there, especially like number 6 about the additional signature. They rile me those posters, and I never approve them.
Das ist ein sehr gut post yah! Danke fur das linken spielen.
No, seriously I think this is a great way to let people know that you have a policy in place to monitor comments and that you don’t mind rewarding useful contributions to your comments by sharing a little bit of link love for the effort. Of course that link juice is gonna get spread pretty thin once the word gets out and every Tom, Dick and Klaus starts dropping “Great barbeque!” comments all over you.
In reference to #5, personally, I don’t mind commentors leaving a deep link to a specific post instead of their homepage if it is relevant and not spammy. Sometimes people leave a legitimate comment and mention a related post they had written that is linked through their name. Regardless, your blog is your territory and you can do whatever the heck you want.
Test comment, lol.
I was just thinking of removing the nofollow attribute myself. It’s a vote of confidence to the readers, giving them something back for contributing. Of course, I’m not referring to one-liners or hit-you-in-the-face spam. I think people are steadily learning some good manners when it comes to leaving a comment on a dofollow blog.
I love all the comments I get from Russia, especially the one that threatened more comments from Russia if I didn’t pay him.
Great post. Spam is getting harder to detect, but these rules are a good start.
Thanks Paul. I notice that some bloggers will approve what appears to be “excerpt spam” (maybe it has some other name?) e.g. “…excerpt pulled from the same post…”
Is there some advantage to doing this? Apart from looking a little more popular? (until someone looks closely, of course)
Good point on the ‘heads up’ on Akismet. I do not have the time to check the hundreds of spam comments each day that Akismet catches. I’d better put an Akismet Ahead sign to warn worthy commenters that they should contact me if their comment is not published. I could be upsetting a lot of people that way. After all netiquette works both ways. I would not want to throw out some perfectly innocent person who wanders in to my free barbecue.
It really is like a barbeque and I must admit that I have more than once embarassed myself at a “barbeque”. So I think I’ll print out your 7 tidbits and pin them to the wall in hopes that I remember to read them before I “manually spam” the next half interesting blog I read.
Was just working on a post about proper way to leave comments when I saw this on Sphinn. You pretty much summed up my thoughts but you’re a lot nicer to most commenters than I have been. Printing this and using it a reference for my next post.
Nice BBQ. :)
On my blogs I have a simple rule: Your name is neither a real name, nor a nickname, nor the name of your website? -> I delete the link.
Hi - thanks for the great BBQ!
How could you not write a comment after this article?
I hope it is up to scratch and not spammy:)
I love this article! I have a DoFollow blog, and I can’t begin to tell you the amount of ridiculous spam comments.
I like the idea of having a DoFollow blog, and I’m not thinking of changing it anytime soon, but it’s just funny the kinds of things people try to slip past me thru comments…. which, I have on moderation, so it never works.
Great post!
This is one of the most common sense guides to netiquette (god, haven’t used that word in a long time) for commenting on dofollow blogs (or any blogs, really) that I’ve ever seen.
I love the BBQ party analogy. Unfortunately, there will always be a few people who just don’t get it, but at least a post like this might help clarify things for people who didn’t realize that they were spamming. I mean, most spammers know what they’re doing, but sometimes I think people just don’t know the “proper” way of doing things.
You posted what I have been saying for quite some time. I guess I should have beat you to it. Your post received much more attention than mine would have anyway.
Much Success!
JUST KIDDING! I couldn’t resist after reading your article. It’s got a lot of good points, but I can understand people who want to promote a site and keyword using their keyword as their anchor text. It doesn’t bother me, but when I look through your comments, it does look more real… not like the Google-Scape that screams at me from other sites.
You can change my name to meathead if you like, but I kind of liked crashing someone’s barbecue and spouting “Meat is Murder”.
Oh, I’m not a vegetarian.
I understand that there is a WordPress plugin that rewards people for being regular visitors to your blog and not one-off popins (like me… gulp…)
I cannot remember the name of it, but it is a little more flexible in that you can set how many comments someone must post before they get a ‘follow’ link.
Yeah, it’s the link love plugin. I know it, but I decided not to complicate the process and offer an incentive for new users to join the conversation.
For a professional site I’d suggest adding a new form field for your favoriute anchor text like Tim Nash did.
For me, as a part time blogger for fun, the way I handle it suffices.
I wonder if eventually Google will implement some algorithm that ignores blog comments and back links. Maybe it depends on how aggresive they become.
Regardless, allowing dofollow is great and encourages comments. The comments benefit the blog because it has the “bandwagon” appeal , so to speak.
An SEO expert told me that back links from blog comments will only make your page come up for unrelated queries.
They do help your page get found by google though!
Thanks for the great blog.
I think creating the nofollow attribute was the worst thing to ever hit the enter. Not only does it NOT curb SPAM it gives less encouragement for people to comment. I think it should be up to the discretion of the blogger whether to give follows or not to the comment poster.
But my name really IS Mr. Viagra Mesothelioma! And man, I really had a tough time growing up.
This is really a great plugin,
Well. Dofollow network helps webmasters and also blog owners for getting popularity,
I must say Blog commenter also helps blog owner and vice versa.
Great tips for SEO folks those are using blog comments as a link building technique, you really need to offer some value and be appreciated for the blog that you are commenting on.
What I dont link in blog commenting is that many blogers turn it into “nofollow”
after they get some exposure.
P.S. I hope my anchor will not annoy you :)
great post and i will try to follow your netiquittes as much as i can. and quite true
that spammers are breaking thw orld loose.
i had to stop posting for few days and take my blog offline to clean it off.
All of my blogs has a dofollow too since I noticed that it is indeed easy to get ‘meaningfull’ comments that are contributing to your post. Just above the comments box I have a big warning sign where I tell them i love to give them a clean link to their site..just asking to use their real name in return.
I think people need to see the other value (besides ankerteksts) of commenting on other blogs…establishing an expert stauts…
Dave
i wouldn’t be surprised if google eventually has its platton of hand editors systematically devalue all dofollow sites. its too much of a risk to their trillion dollar empire.
Was quite a useful article to read. Just recently my blog has started getting the steady trickle of spam. I just simply delete the spam comments, or remove spam links if the comment is reasonably useful.
Thanks for the article.;
To add my two canadian cents, I think SEOs put too much emphasis on anchor text. Maybe it used to work, but not anymore. Excessive repetition of anchor text probably gets dampened by Google. And for good reason, because natural anchor text won’t contain a huge % of same keyword phrases.
Also, Google seems to be heavily leaning in favour of domains with a history of importance (links going to any page on the domain). Sites are ranking with few or zero backlinks, for competitive keywords(!).
I’m sure the nofollow tag will affect the number of comments but i think a comment is a way of communication and not an incentive for the poster. In any case Google decides what is best for them and we simply can’t do anything about it. We just watch and learn to apply their rules. :-|
I happen to agree with Glenn, SEO experts focus too much of attention on the anchor text while dealing with link building. Google has altered it’s algorithms and you run the risk of being tagged as spam.
I’m sure it won’t be long before comment links are not counted by Google, it’s just too easy for exploitation. Some of the things I’ve seen people do just makes me shake my head, I’d wager 90% of the websites out there were created for no other intention but to add links that point to the legitimate pages. An enormous amount of time and energy is spent trying to game the system.
Wow, nice post! (what, was that bad?) J/K - I use dofollow links on my blog as well. It’s time we started spreading the link authority around on smaller blogs so that we can compete with the bigger brands in online marketing.
I don’t like using my real name and would not post at a site that requires it. I don’t spam blogs, I try to make meaningful comments, and I read not only the original post, but all the comments as well.
Of coure I am often looking for a link love, but there on some blogs I would post a comment without it.
I think it’s interesting that everyone involved with SEO (which I am myself in a very amateur way) thinks that people wouldn’t leave comments on blogs without some link juice flowing out. Of course, 99% of the people involved in social networking sites are really involved in the social networking aspect of it and the link love really doesn’t matter to them.
Also one poster above made a post that doesn’t make much sense to me. He talked about deleting SPAM comments, or if the comment was useful just deleting the link. If the comment was useful enough to leave, how could it be considered SPAM and why delete the link?
Thanks for the post, very nice.
Seriously though, Keyword Luv creates a symbiotic relationship. The blogger gets more comments (and therefore, more visits), and the commenter gets a one-way backlink.
When I post, I make a point of (a)reading the post, (b)writing something appropriate and of value to the discussion, and (c)not mentioning my business unless it is germane to the subject.
I also hate when people put their link in the body of their “comment” too. I mean, you already got a backlink, tied to your keyword and everything, so calm down.
I considered using Comment as well as Keyword Luv but it’s a little too much SEO and not enough value for the blogger. I’m undecided though, maybe I add it later on.
I’ve recently installed that plugin to make my blog dofollow too. It will be interesting to see what transpires.
Cheer for the informative article, I may also cover this topic soon.
I’ll be honest, I was dofollow, but switched it back to nofollow. The amount of manual spam (to use a phrase I know you don’t like) I got did reduce, but it’s still there.
I think it’s because I was featured on those ruddy “dofollow” list that do the rounds on digitalpoint etc. and people think “linkback linkback linkback!” and don’t care about the lack of SEO benefit….
Well, I know you don’t like the thanks posts, but thanks for this anyway. :P This totally is SEO 2.0, you are so right in calling it that. I really hope G stays cool with it, it would be a shame to loose this resource.
Thanks for the guidelines as well, more people need to read this!
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