From where the short posts come...
Written by on in Polis.

Have been seeing weirdly trivial blog-post spam lately.  Someone will post a single-line comment that is entirely generic, no real content, just a bland "nice post" or "thanks for the article" where the user's URL is a link to what looks like a SEO page.

Turns out that there's a set of sites that "markets" collections of "Do Follow" (i.e. those not rewriting links with the no-follow attribute) enabled blogs, where the purchasers are asked to stump up cash and post "useful" messages to the blogs involved so that they don't exhaust the resource (i.e. exploitable blogs).

Sigh.  So if I mistakenly take down your short post as a commercial spam, I apologize, but the SEOs made me do it.  It would be nice if the various commons didn't need policing, but apparently it does, and I guess I'm the beat-cop in this neighborhood.

Comments

  1. Rene Dudfield

    Rene Dudfield on 08/24/2009 7:17 a.m. #

    spammers: a stab in the eye.

    Can you make your links no follow?

  2. Clothes

    Clothes on 08/24/2009 1:42 p.m. #

    Yep spammers suck but there are a lot of people who are working on SEO that actually take time to read the articles and make an intelligent comment with no real intention of returning. They don't suck so much as long as the add to the conversation.

  3. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 08/24/2009 6:49 p.m. #

    I don't really want to make the blog no-follow. I figure people who are participating because they want to be part of the community can share my ever-so-precious page-rank ;) . I'm okay with having to disable links individually for the ones who are just here to abuse me/us/google :) .

  4. Joe Caws

    Joe Caws on 08/25/2009 9:57 a.m. #

    This is very true. We get plenty of people through our own blog doing similar things and eventually ended up going down the no-follow route. Theres a fair amount of dofollow directories around which once you get found and end up listed here you become a bit of a target unfortunately. I do agree on the dofollow being a reward for commenters in principle... just a shame that its open to so much abuse.

    Joe

  5. James

    James on 08/25/2009 4:59 p.m. #

    The problem is that now you can't even protect your pr by turning no follow. Matt cutts of google has recently said that pr will be spread equally between all links, Internal and outgoing, and if the links are do followed, you pass on the pr, but if they're no followed, the pr just vanishes into thin air. You don't get to keep it, so what can you do other than moderate, which takes up the time you could be using to write.

  6. rexsky

    rexsky on 08/25/2009 8:34 p.m. #

    hey James,you are right..I agree with you 100%...learn a lot about pr from you..thanks...I like dofollow..

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