“do follow” dead?
There have been reports that “do follow” is dead.. Tricia of Feverish Thoughts claims that she is sick of “human created comment spam”, Darren Rouse on his famous Problogger.net blog points out that there is a new despicable service available where you can pay people to place comments on blogs for you, Randa Clay says that some people are turning their “no follow” back on again (including Wendy at eMomsathome, who has indeed turned hers back on again) and Lorelle at wordpress also speaks out about human generated comment spam (and mentions that she is happy she has “no follow” tags on her blog.)
Personally I agree with Randa when she concudes that turning the no follow back on again will not dramatically reduce span anyway, and:
I just don’t think it’s enough of a problem to worry over for most bloggers. Moderate comments, zap the questionable ones and if a few get through… oh well.
What I think this furore has brought to light, for me at least, is the question of why we want comments and how comments benefit us. Is a human spammed comment really that bad?
I’m going out on a limb here and I’m going to say that for the beginning blogger, it’s probably not all that bad as long as the comments aren’t total junk and the spam isn’t obvious. (If it is obvious, then you just delete it of course!)
When you are just starting out in blogging, it’s exciting when someone comments on your blog, even if that someone is a paid commenter. It’s a signal to the new blog owner that their blog is now “on the map”.. and a discreet spam comment will at least give your blog some inkling of credibility. Nobody likes to break the ice on a new post or a new blog where nobody else has commented before.
Indeed some of the blogging guru’s out there suggest that you break the ice yourself by setting up a dummy user and commenting on your own blog!
If comment spammers can do this for you.. all the better and less work for you to do. All you need to do is to moderate the really obvious spam. Of course in the long run, this won’t get you a thriving community (which is what many seek to achive with their blog) but as an interim marketing tactic, allowing (and some would say encouraging) comment spam in the early days may give your blog a boost towards becoming a community.
You can use these early comments to respond.. by responding to all the comments you receive you are showing that you are happy to interact with your readers. Blogs where comments are not responded too have a difficult time getting off the ground in terms of building community.
As Randa also points out, the overhead of a few spammy comments isn’t worth the trade off for the extra comments we may receive from having “no follow” turned off, until perhaps we have a super-blog where we are having to moderate dozens of comments a day. In that case, you would do as she has suggested and Link Love plugin should do the trick. (It turns the “no follow” off for regular commenters.)
Thanks for your addition to this discussion. People really get their boxers in a bunch over things that just don’t matter sometimes.
The past three or four weeks has been very bad. I’ve seen a HUGE increase in comment spam - made by humans.
Blogs that aren’t that busy aren’t getting hit as bad - perhaps because the comment spammers haven’t found them or perhaps because the PR on their sites isn’t high enough to draw them in.
My husband and I have 9 blogs between us. When someone goes around to each of the sites (and I’m presuming everyone of the other sites on whatever do follow list they are following) and leaves comments that are “weakly” about the post and partly about how their own site is great or adding links to words within their comment that go to sites that are totally unrelated to the post or site that the comment is on it become pretty obvious what they are doing.
Of the nine blogs that my husband and I run four of them are pretty busy and yes on the busiest ones there are sometimes dozens of comments a day - mostly from regular readers but increasingly from those who are using do follow blogs to plug their businesses.
Up until a few weeks ago this wasn’t so bad. 1 out of every 10 comments was human generated
“do follow” comment spam, now it’s every second one? If I get say 50 comments on my main blog, and 25 each on the other three busy ones and 10 each on the slower ones in a day … well that’s a lot of comments to either delete or take links out of. I’d rather spend that time writing posts or promoting my sites in my own way.
The linkylove plugin in it’s current state makes four calls to the databases each time someone leaves a comment. If you have a busy site you’ll soon run into cpu resource issues. Lucia from money.bigbucksblogger.com is working on a new linkylove plugin that will make less calls to the database and won’t be so resource intensive for busy sites. Once she’s created that I’m going to switch to that plugin.
Thanks for the write up!
It is a never ending cat/mouse chase. If you enable no follow back and then allow link love, you will get more spam per person
That is the only way to get in the top commentator spot 
Hi Folks - thanks for your comments!
Tricia, thanks for alaborating on what the problem is. For many of us with blogs that are smaller than yours, we’d love to have lots of comments, but as they say, you can definitely have too much of a good thing, particularly with that many blogs and if the quality of the comments isn’t great.
Hopefully Lucia will come up with a plugin that reduces the calls to the database.. 4 calls is alot of calls. (I used to be a programmer - so I appreciate the system resources that this consumes!)
I’ll have to keep an eye on her site and do a write up when she has released the plugin - I noticed that she was in Beta so hopefully this is not too far off! I’ll do a writeup here when it is ready..
Thanks so much for taking the time to shed more light on this issue.. it’s probably not an issue that many beginner bloggers are going to face, it’s good to understand different facets of the dilemma.
I had dofollow on my blog for a while and noticed that the people who were commenting the most on the blog didn’t even have websites. They were just so emotionally involved in the article that they couldn’t resist hitting the “submit” button.
So I took dofollow off. It didn’t seem to be doing anything for me anyways. I certainly didn’t get comment spam.
The linkylove plugin, once its optimized, does sound like a great idea. Of course, you could just go through your comments and post the top commentors on a post, like John Chow does.
i’ve just today taken off the no follow tag in an effort to attract more comments. i don’t yet have the luxury of having too many comments to moderate.
Greg Boser has a new do follow plug in worth checking out. I dont think do follow is dead at all, especially with people like Greg pushing it.
I have dofollow comments but I still have a moderator feature. So I just make sure that it is not a spammy comment.
I have a few blogs and comment spam will always be there. I don’t mind human comment spam if it sounds like they actually read the post. Isn’t that what we want the humans to do? You may get a new reader!
How will you know if one of the blog is do using do follow?. I am bit confused as I have no idea how to know if a blog is using do follow or no follow . I am using internet explorer do I need to used firefox?. But I have a do follow blog. Which is the best place to list it?. I know a lot of people are looking for do follow blog?.
I can now safely say that putting back on the NoFollow has drastically reduced the amount of human written spam my blog receives. Though I still frequently get referrals from the DoFollow lists, and it’s obvious when someone thinks I am still a DoFollow blog.
NoFollow isn’t worth it, and there are other ways to reward readers who get involved.
I have also taken off the nofollow from my blog. sometimes it’s good to give some link luv. Just have you too spend a little more time on your blog, But the way i look at it you gotta take the good with the bad.
Isn’t moderation the name of the game if you are using do follow?
You could always use some sort of captha or image to stop automated posts. This way you know a actual person commented on you blog not some software program running by itself.
Nice post, I didn’t even know what effect nofollow had before reading this post.
Good article….helped me understand the importance of follow vs no follow.
Ronnie