“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.)





























































