Because of recent changes in the way I am working, I had to change my posting schedule and dedicate more time to things that really matter and are more productive.
I have noticed a big change though in the comment section and I guess that has to do with the growing number of D-lists I seem to be on. Now, this blog has been a do-follow blog for quite some time now but recently I am seriously considering to turn off that option and go back to being a no-follow blog and it is not even because of SEO smarts and not wanting to spoil linkjuice anymore.
The reason I am considering going back to being a no-follow blog is the amount of crappy comments coming from some very lazy people who arrived here because of some D-list.
Comment strategies (posting on d-list blogs) are great in order to grow your blog and get more backlinks but man, some people just don´t seem to realize they are killing this whole system!
I have seen some complaints on how most d-list aren´t updated and are pointing in the direction of no-follow blogs and even some angry comments on why so many blogs are no-follow eventhough they are on a d-list…
Well guys, the answer is really simple, it completely sucks to see your own blog being abused by some lazy ass commentators who think that just any comment is appreciated!
My initial reason to turn on do-follow on my blog was to share some linkjuice with my regular visitors and people who were leaving good comments, adding to the value of my blog with some interesting points of view.
I don´t care if you use keywords instead of your name but man, atleast show some respect when using my blog in your comment strategies!! And by respect I don´t mean you gotta say “great blog”, “interesting post” or “I have signed up for your RSS” but what I want to say is atleast have the decency to READ the post and COMMENT with something useful to say!
By being a lazy ass commentator with the only thing on your mind being to get some linkjuice, you are KILLING the Do Follow movement so don´t whine and complain when one day you arrive on this blog through a do-follow list and find I have gone back to being a no-follow blog, because the only reason I would go back to no-follow is being completely fed up with seeing my blog abused by the do-follow abusers!
So cheers to you and think a little before commenting, if d-lists are part of your link building strategies, make sure you aren´t killing your own strategy!
Don´t bite the hand that feeds you!
great post. haha just kidding. I have been using d-list blog as a great way to build my backlinks and traffic because it is free. I am surprised that more bloggers don’t spend the time to do the same.
Tom – StandOutBlogger.com’s last blog post..Should I Enter ‘Blogging Idol’?
Mirjam:
I have disabled the do-follow features off due to the same reasons. Too many “nice post”, “Great article”, “Very informative” craps on my comments.
I think most people or bloggers are still practicing gray hat SEO and believe in PR (page rank). They are often lost in the PR game.
I left comment on the blog regardless it is do-follow or nofollow. I left comment because I believe that my points will be well taken. Building backlinks don’t give you too much help on search engine (organic) traffic.
If you have good quality content, people will find you and link to you. Remember, most people on the Internet are NON-bloggers. The rely on search engine to find you. They don’t even know about do-follow or PR.
I rather spent time on building the search engine traffic than left crap comments. At the moment, I believe building a great social profile will be more helpful than leave comments on people’s blogs. It’s like branding yourself. Look at DoshDosh and Problogger, they are now active on social profiling. The interesting thing is that there are people very famous out there who are not a blogger at all.
I would recommend you to join me on Plurk and twitter.
I have made more friends and increased readership from there.
Terence Chang’s last blog post..Weekend Confession 10 – moving on
Da$# straight!
I was never a do-follow, but this is bad. People should realize there is a person behind a blog and not a “system” you can cheat.
I do have recent comments on mine, which are reset every month and which are do-follow. And hey, I have have one guy commenting on the 2nd of each month..
But, that’s ok, I’m not a jackass. It is good to help someone out with his efforts… his comments are at least trying to be content related.
Cheers,
Alex
Alex at Net-Entrepreneur.com’s last blog post..There’s Always a First Time for Anything
I’ve been running back and forth in mind mind over whether or not I should join a d-list myself. All my blogs are do follow, but I am an honest believer in if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all. And in this case I mean if you don’t actually put some effort into your comment, don’t flippin leave one!
Magickal Mama’s last blog post..Litha
I agree with you that as a comment strategy it might work, the point I am trying to stress here though is that the people that actually use this system should realize that there actions, especially if they don´t take the time to make a good comment, (ie, showing you actually read the post, thoughtfull, adding something to the original post) they are actually destroying that same strategy themselves.
For now, this blog is do follow, there is commentluv plus a top commentators list… that means 3 times exposure you can get … but…. I am getting easier and easier in deleting comments just like that, because I am fed up with seeing this blog abused just like that, and if this continues the way it is going right now, all do-follow comments are going to be no-follow.
So… again…. don´t bit the hand that is feeding you!
hey Alex
hmmmm… are you saying I should go over to your blog and comment more? ROFL
It is not just for being a person, but it is the time and effort most put in their blog, their resources, their money etc, and I grew up believing I should treat others with respect, so going around commenting just on a d-follow blog, eventhough at times I do in order to get some quick backlinks, still holds that value of respect towards the blogger, and I´d only comment if I feel I can add something ….
Wish more did
I agree with you, I actually joined one d-list myself but notice I am getting listed on more and more every time around, and check out the list and comment on it, especially if the blogger makes a lame ass post saying something like:
use these blogs in your comment strategies and goes on about how to use d-list, how to put in keywords etc, but says nothing about posting a meaningfull comment and respect the do-follow blog….
Hey Terence
I´m going to visit my family over the weekend so I´ll have a look at twitter next week, although I have to admit I´m kind of weary to join more social networks to be honest, I tend to get “lost” in them, spending hours and hours relating to other people and right now I am trying hard to focus on other things…
I assume “d-list” means a do-follow directory? I dunno how many I’m on, but I sure see your point.
I consider myself quite lucky, as i get very few crap type comments. Most get caught by Akismet…I assume their IP is well known or something.
I just happily delete the ones I do find in notification. I sometimes even go so far as to notify the person that their comments have been deleted and why.
To my great surprise, I have actually gotten thank you replies that they are new and didn’t realize…or they are new and were “instructed” to do so….which irks me more then you realize.
Have you thought of switching to one of those plugins that enables you to set a specific amount of comments before they turn do-follow? These can be a real turnoff to drive-bys.
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..7 Turbo Writing Tips
For the record, I believe I found you via EC
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..7 Turbo Writing Tips
Pardon me, but I don’t really see why people remove the nofollow links in the commenting of their blogs. It’s like letting in huge spamming list into it.
Melvin’s last blog post..University Kid vs. The Net Fool Blogs Head To Head Premiere
I understand your frustration Mirjam, but there is an upside to being on the d-lists as well.
I probably would not have found your blog were it not for a d-list. And I have returned to read more of your posts several times. So I have become a semi-regular reader since finding you on a d-list.
It’s a trade-off I suppose, but if your blog is good, then being on the d-lists can end up being good advertising.
Tom’s last blog post..My Thoughts On The Ultimate Fighter Finale
Hi Tom, thank you for your comment, it seems I did not succeed in explaining what I wanted to explain. it is not the “being on d-lists” that I am worried about, it is the way the d-lists seems to be ABUSED by too many people, without them realizing they themselves are killing what could be a good comment strategy in order to build backlinks.
Hope that clears things a bit
*thinking here… *
I know I found your blog through webdiggin and the comments you made there, which lead me to commenting on your blog LOL
I completely get that it annoys to find people who were “instructed” to comment on d-lists without realizing how important it is to make the best out of the comments if that is the strategy they choose to use, which is why I wrote this post in the first place
always good to see you around here
I already explained why I decided to turn off the no-follow, and eventhough it brings along alittle extra work, I still stand behind that decision, what gets to me is that people just don´t seem to understand that that short cuts in the end really might not work, and abusing other people will in the end turn against them.
No Mirjam, you explained it perfectly.
I was just saying that the extra advertising for your blog that comes from being on the lists, may make up for the hassle of having to delete or moderate useless comments. Or it may not, lol. I’m not in your position, so I don’t know if it’s a worth it or not. I guess it doesn’t matter that much, as you are already on the lists and would probably remain on them even if you switched back to nofollow. So you’ll still get the free advertising.
But I do get what you are saying!
Tom’s last blog post..The Cure for Writer’s Block
Proof positive that it pays to comment constructively
Dennis Edell’s last blog post..12 Ways To Outsell Your Competition
What’s a d-list?
You know something I have been missing you posting more often.
hey Jim!!
sorry sorry sorry, but I have been so busy with other things, plus I went “back home” for our annual family reunion, still “recuperating” from the last ROFLMAO, but it is nice to know somebody misses my posts!
a D-list is a list of blogs that have the no-follow option turned off, so they become Do-Follow blogs. This in turn means that people who leave comments on these Do-follow blogs get a link back to their site, and whenever a search engine robot checks out a blog, it will follow the links.
Commenting on a D-list blog adds another valid backlink to the commentators blog or website, which is why people use these lists in order to create backlinks, they comment and get the link. Nothing wrong there, but some people go a step further and abuse do-follow blogs in order to create more backlinks, leaving crappy comments without even reading the post itself. Hope this clears up things
it sure is proof
Shame some people are just too dumb or lazy to understand where the true value of commenting lies LOL
Unfortunately, promoting the fact that your comments do not have the nofollow tag attached to them is a sure fire way to get pointless, irrelevant comments from spammers who whose only interest in your blog is to get a link using a keyword.
I would definately encourage you to add the nofollow tag back to comment links. I’m sure the average comment would be a lot less spammy
Kevin’s last blog post..Networking is not a one way street
So this is why I use Askimet to weed out some the more obvious spam comments.
I get it now. You are always so informative. Now get back to writing or else. lol
LOL I am using akismet as well but it is not a catch all system
Hey Kevin
at this point I am still not wanting to turn no-follow back on, because it goes against my initial decision to turn do-follow on, wanting to give something back to people who do take the time to make meaningfull comments on my posts.
Mirjam – I think people are disillusioned by the benefits of passing juice to commentators websites. The PR would be so small and in my experience, those who comment only to get some PR juice leave poorer comments. Good comments should come from good articles. A top commenters list can also be spammed but I think that would be much better than sending PR to everyone who leaves a comment.
You should check out dailyblogtips comments stats plugin. It shows who has commented the most in your dashboard and you can then decide how you want to reward them (eg. a thank you post). This leaves you in full control and you can simply leave spammers off this list.
Kevin’s last blog post..Networking is not a one way street
One of my blogs has been dofollow for months and on many lists and I been getting junk comments, but I also get mostly good comments. I f someone posts nonsense and doesnt even read the post then I delete it, but otherwise I approve it even if their name looks spammy.
Bodybuilding Videos’s last blog post..Ronnie Coleman Bench Press Video
Heh-heh. When I first read this post, I wondered if you were using “D-List” like Kathy Griffin does — as in “a notch below the A-List, B-List, and C-List” blogs. I’m glad someone else asked in the comments, because I was about to.
)
I leave comments only if I have something to say, whether the person has nofollow on or off. That’s one of several reasons why I wasn’t a good fit for Entrecard — to drop cards quickly and accumulate points efficiently, I visited lots of fast-loading blogs I didn’t particularly love and didn’t have anything to comment on. Bleah — waste o’ my time.
But back to the point of this post: I use the Lucia’s Linky Love plug-in on my self-hosted WordPress blog to manage this issue. It’s designed to minimize the problem of “human comment spammers leaving insipid, irrelevant comments just to get link-juice.” You can set it up so it only adds dofollow to the author name and links in comment after a commenter leaves some minimum number of comments (3-10).
It’s at this URL: http://money.bigbucksblogger.com/lucias-linky-love-a-dofollow-plugin-to-foil-human-comment-spammers/
Carolyn Bahm’s last blog post..47×365, No. 60 – Smelly Girl
I agree with your observations about spammy comments, but I hope you don’t go back the other way. I, too, arrived here from a D-List of sorts…in fact, my own new do-follow blog directory:
http://riseabovedirectory.com
So I would likely have never stopped by had you not gone the do-follow route. But I completely concur with your comments, as I stated in my philosophical statement on the directory:
http://riseabovedirectory.com/our_philosophy.html
The simple fact is that many folks have no moral core when it comes to how they put food on the table. They’ll do anything to make a dime, and they don’t care who they “use” to get there. I find that terribly sad. I believe it’s important to take steps to yank the web back from the hands of the idiots (having already lost the battle in terms of email spam, etc)…so I am firm in my commitment to do-follow…but I won’t honor spammers by approving their comments. That’s the only way to choke off those of that ilk.
CommentLuv is great…and I also like KeywordLuv as an option…which enables folks to use their real name in their posts, but also to get the anchor text they need.
Don’t give up the good fight. The idiots will eventually go find a new strategy, once they find out that “Great post!” isn’t going to get them anything but a comment deletion.
Chuck’s last blog post..Cure for Bad Breath
You know what you could do; just go in and edit only certain comments to be do-follow comments, then delete the crappy ones.
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The good resource is informative and actual