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The Magnificent 7, The NoFollow Alternative
By Jamie | August 15, 2007
Like many bloggers who have installed the NoFollow Plugin I have seen an increase in traffic and comments. Which is fantastic news! Although the number of paid for comments or human spam comments has also increased. So what can be done about this?
The regular spam comments don’t seem to be a problem with Akismet and Captcha plugin’s installed. Its those that contain subject related comments regarding the post. When anyone leaves a comment, I check out their website at which point you can tell they are only after one thing, back links! Sometimes you can spot these spam comments because their email address is a free account and doesn’t match the website address, but some times your wrong. Once they have had their comment approved they won’t be back again. From SEO perspective I’m become a cheap way to get backlinks which could affect my companies page strength. From a blogging community prospective the people leaving these comments don’t provide any real value to my blog.
Magnificent 7
So rather than simply de-activate the plugin and admit defeat, I have replaced it with LinkLove plugin which will allow regular readers who comment seven times or more, to have their NoFollow tags permanently removed. I have also added the Top comments plugin as another bonus for my regular readers. By default Link Love is setup with 10 comments or over as the threshold, this is easily changed in the plugin editor within WordPress.
Feedback
I’m really keen to get feed back from other blogs that currently use NoFollow plugin or have disabled the plugin because of the increase in spam comments.
Jamie
Topics: Hot Posts!, Marketing & Social Media, Tech Overload, Web development & eCommerce |
August 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
Thanks for the tip Jamie - I’m about to try and put link love in place now.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:46 am
I hope it works out for you!
August 29th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I was using a Plugin that removes nofollow after a set time period (24 hours in my case). This is a much better option though, so I’m changing now.
Cheers Jamie.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:46 am
David Airey’s spin on this subject
Combat DoFollow spammers using this WordPress Plugin
September 15th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
I understand the motivation to deter manual spammers, but seven is a little steep. 3-5 should do the trick. You want to reward people who are contributing quality comments to your site.
September 17th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Mlankton - I have now changed it to five comments. At the moment, if you comment 3 times you will get link on my frontpage too.
Jamie