DoFollow Spammer Scum

Wendy Piersall has noticed that spammers are picking up on the “DoFollow” (removal of nofollow on comments) movement.

I feel for you, Wendy, they’ve tried to do it here too. This is how they do it:  they put in a comment - something innocuous like “nice site” or “this is great” - the trusting blogger allows the comment - and before you know it, ten comments follow with links to hotlatexlolitas.com or worse.

They, and the related grey-area keyword-as-name blogsters, are destroying Wendy’s trust in the DoFollow link love movement. Anything that reduces trust is bad.

So what do we do about it? I’ve had a lot of success with trusting Akismet and being a little paranoid - no comment from an untrusted source is left unmoderated, and I don’t trust ‘”hey dude, nice site” comments - leave them in your “to be moderated” or “Akismet spam” folders for a day or two and see if they get the hotlatexlolitas.com followup.


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2 Responses to “DoFollow Spammer Scum”


  1. 1 Wendy Piersall (2 comments.)

    Thanks for continuing the conversation Andrew - the “nice site” comments are easy to dump! It’s the ones that actually reference the post, but are intended as spam that are the difficult ones to identify. Akismet doesn’t usually catch them, because it’s a person, not a ‘bot’. I’d be curious to hear about what the rest of your readers have to say! :)

  2. 2 Andrew Boyd (231 comments.)

    Hi Wendy,

    good point. I guess that I don’t have to worry about these human spammers so much because (a) I’m not that popular yet and (b) I’m not looking at it as a business so much as a hobby. Like I said, I feel for you - because you have a great blog and deserve to make a living from it.

    Best regards, Andrew

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