I am a huge proponent of DoFollow blogs and believe that encouraging commenters by rewarding them with a DoFollow backlink (especially when combined with CommentLuv) encourages people to come and leave comments on your blog. KeyWordLuv is another plugin that allows people to leave @Keywords after their username and get the link back to their website with the keywords of their choice. This gives even more benefit than just the linkback but also helps a commenter who leaves a comment improve their search engine rankings by having a valuable keyword set linked to their blog instead of just their name.
The problem that I am finding is that KeywordLuv is heavily abused by marketing and advertising folks looking to make a quick back link and after seeing dozens of “Mark@Oceanside Divorce Lawyers” or “Bill@Cheap Auto Parts” commenters I realize that the system is being abused. Especially when the landing page is nothing more than an advertising site or a flat website selling products. I have already run across other major blogs that have “Enter your username only, any keywords after your username will be removed or comment deleted” and I am starting to think this may not be a bad idea.
It has gotten bad enough that I can have forty to fifty comments per week from the same few commenters on various articles where it becomes obvious they are just stealing as much PR Juice as they can get and get as many SEO links they can. In many cases the commenter does provide a comment of some value, they aren’t “Great post” comments or anything, yet the intentions are still blatantly obvious.
Here are what I think are etiquette when using KeywordLuv on blogs:
- Limit commenting to no more than a few per day + replies to any direct comments on any one blog
- Vary up your Keywords or use no Keywords sometimes (especially at first to establish yourself as a trusted commenter)
- Add value with every comment and don’t just rephrase/paste portions of the article and say “I like this part”
I am not knocking my regular commenters who I don’t mind leveraging KeywordLuv and I see their comments regularly, I am addressing the drop by 1x and never see them again folks who are only randomly seeking out free backlinks. I also may consider banishing KeywordLuv from this site in the future, but still will leave CommentLuv and DoFollow but I am curious how other bloggers handle the KeywordLuv abuse? Who has the time to manually review and trash comments that you don’t like which leads to censorship which I don’t like either.
Let me know your thoughts on KeywordLuv abuse and if this is something my fellow bloggers have encountered.
-Dragon Blogger
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Tags: blogging tips, comment spam, dealing with spammers, DoFollow Blogs, DoFollow Links, keywordluv abuse, wordpress dofollow
July 30th, 2010 at 8:08 am
I am going to subscribe to your blog, I keep missing posts when I don’t follow under you at Blog Engage.
I don’t use Keyword Luv, too many abusers like you say. I get enough spam from keywords telling me what a wonderful blog I have and how informative an article is (when it’s just a post with my kids pictures, I’m wondering exactly what part of the post was so informative).
I know I could leave keywords at other sites that use it, but for myself, I just prefer to leave a comment as myself, without a keyword. When I visit blogs, it isn’t to advertise my own blog, it’s because I actually enjoy that blogger (you for example). If someone wants to come back and visit my blog, that’s awesome, but I don’t visit a blog and leave comments with that intention, and I definitely don’t feel it’s right to advertise my blog in someone else’s comments.
Great post!
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July 30th, 2010 at 8:10 am
I hear that, my poetry blog gets so many “This is an informative article” comments, and I think “Its a poem you morons”
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July 30th, 2010 at 8:15 am
I think changing as you suggest will only have limited success in stopping the spammers, as most of them are automated bots that scour the internet looking for “footprints”, i.e. common elements on comment forms, such as “leave a reply” and “this site uses keyword luv”, or “notify me of followup comments via e-mail” By modifying all the label elements on and around your comment form, you will drastically cut down on automated spam.
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July 30th, 2010 at 8:24 am
yeah, but doesn’t that require changes to the wordpress core php files which get blown away after each update?
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July 30th, 2010 at 8:30 am
I think that Dragon Blogger may be a victim of a piece of software called Comment Kahuna. You get a lot of spammers using it because you can post the same generic message to a bunch of blogs to build backlinks.
I wouldn’t blame you for ditching keywordluv and/or commentluv. They’re a good idea in theory, but there’s too many mass spammers out there who’ll just abuse any linking opportunity they find.
Jake@Hypnosis´s last blog ..How To Use Hypnosis Scripts
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July 30th, 2010 at 8:53 am
Most of the spam comments don’t trigger CommentLuv, commentluv I rarely see abused since its just a link back to users latest article.
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July 30th, 2010 at 9:47 am
I understand what you mean with the abuse of keyword luv. I can’t say I haven’t done it myself with keywords but never got into the keyword luv thing. I do always read the post and try and leave a meaningful comment. The whole top com and keywordluv stuff is a pretty gray area anyway. I am not surprised people are abusing it.
tracy ingram´s last blog ..‘Unhackable’ Android phone can be hacked
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July 30th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Haha i love that part “Its a poem you morons”
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July 30th, 2010 at 11:20 am
Funny, even though I have KeywordLuv on my blog, I don’t encourage it’s use, per se. I am still making up my mind. I feel that there are many awesome ways to get keyword contextual back links and even though I have used a keyword regularly in commenting, I’ve slowed down because I haven’t found it helpful. It even annoys me to see it when I leave comments.
On your thing about the commenters who aren’t really spamming, per se, but they’re abusing the KeywordLuv system, I agree. There is someone who does that regularly on my blog. He/she uses the same IP address (at first, and now they’ve added one other) so that’s how I knew it was the same person (plus, it was just a first name, always linked to a sales page rather than a blog, and very thin/not useful comments). And the person would change the names, even. Very clever. Different names, URLs, but same IPs and style of commenting.
I started marking the 3rd and 4th as spam, because that is really what they are actually doing, they’re just not using a sophisticated system. If you leave more than one comment on a blog and you pretend you are someone else, you are spamming, in my opinion.
Tia´s last blog ..Is Your Blog Missing This Key Search Engine Magnet
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July 30th, 2010 at 11:30 am
I agree with you, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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July 30th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Exactly why I just started using the plugin a few months go instead of like 5 yrs ago when it was first created.
I do use it now, yes, but with a much wordier and unwavering comment policy.
For the 1off drive-bys, just use a do follow plugin wherein you can set how many are need before that users comments turn do follow. I use http://www.michelem.org/wordpress-plugin-nofollow-free/ .
I love your bullet points.
1. Limit comments – An awesome way to distinguish manual human from auto-commenting.
You know they hit more then your one blog, if their is more then a few in one day; darn good chance it’s automated.
2. Vary up your Keywords – Google themselves will tell you this is a must! Not using any at first is exactly how I did it.
3. Value – of course!
I’d like to add one – keep your keywords to 3 or less – John Doe @ the best seo specialist in the world, is ugly and just rude. lol
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..Last Post and Current To-Do List
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July 30th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Three or less is a good one, I hate four or five keywords and agree its obnoxious.
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July 30th, 2010 at 12:42 pm
Dude, that NOFF plugin is AWESOME. I just installed and configured it, I will most definitely be writing a post about it and link back to you for pointing me to it.
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August 1st, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Hey thanks man, much appreciated.
Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing´s last blog ..2 Immediate Feedbacks Needed PLEASE!
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
One problem with Michelle’s NOFF plug-in is that once the anchor text changes, the dofollow goes off. At least that’s what I’ve noticed on my blog thus I deactivated it and activated Jennifer R’s Link Love which dofollow’s comments based on email address. You can check out my post: http://www.strictlyonlinebiz.com/blog/top-dofollow-plugins/1597/
With regards to Keyword Luv abuse, I just got a comment from a first timer using 6 keywords @ go. I immediately modified my comment policy. Any keyword/phrase more than 3 words risks deletion.
Udegbunam Chukwudi@Blog Setup Service´s last blog ..How To Organize Your WordPress Posts In Categories
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
The only think I like in NoFF over LinkLove are the fact that you can make specific keywords always NoFollow and I like the way NoFF can put comment total next to commenter name. But for ease of use and benefit to commenter, LinkLove is better for allowing them to be flexible with their keywords. If only LinkLove would add those 2 extra features.
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
I only recently added commentluv to my blog and I’ve already seen a large increase in the number of comments im getting, but also spam ones as well like yourself.
the askimet plugin filters them all out really though, but it also catches some legit comments as well. Since I don’t have hundreds of them at the moment I don’t have to worry to much about it as it only takes me 5 minutes to go through them, but I can see how it becomes a problem
Robert´s last blog ..Top 10 Mini Camcorders
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Combine Akismet with WP-SpamFree and you will have far fewer comments you have to filter through.
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
I can always tell which of my blog posts have good PR – I don’t even have to go to them. They’re always the ones that get the most comments, not from regulars, but from new commenters.
I personally look at it on a case by case basis. If someone leaves me a worthwhile comment, and their website isn’t terribly offensive, I allow it. If they don’t leave a good comment, though, I don’t approve them.
I have the “pleasure” of seeing blog commenting from all sides – as a blog owner, as a commenter looking to build my own reputation, and as someone who works in the SEO industry and knows how comments are leveraged for backlinks.
My basic philosophy is to read the post I’m commenting on, and make sure that the comment I leave is valuable to the discussion, regardless of what link I am leaving with my name or for what purpose. I think if everyone approached commenting this way, then there would be less abuse and more happy bloggers with tons of useful comments. And as a blog owner, if someone has done that on my site, then I’ll happily link back to their used tire shop.
Kristi@Blogging Tips´s last blog ..SEO Infographic – Link Building Data Visualization
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Since being DoFollow however, I have 0 posts with a PR above 0 besides my homepage. DoFollow is a good way to drain any PR juice out of individual posts however.
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July 30th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Do you build links to your posts? I have several that are PR 1 – 4, and usually those are ones I went out and did a lot of commenting with. I have a chart that I did a while back on Google PageRank vs. popular content. Some in that list are guest posts on other sites, but all of the posts on my site are dofollow / keywordluv / commentluv enabled.
Kristi@Blogging Tips´s last blog ..Fetching Friday – Resources- Easy Tweet Sharing Tool & Maru Meows
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July 31st, 2010 at 7:51 am
I only rely on CommentLuv to link back to the posts, I always just put my homepage as my URL with my name. I try to do internal linking but am not that focused on it. I do see your blog sites/content and PR is high for pages with 62 dofollow links out. How did you collect those stats for the table, was it very manual or did you have a utility that pull that info and you cut/paste?
July 30th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
I don’t use keywordLuv, but in my opinion, if it’s not an authentic comment, it’s spam. As a blog owner, you have the right to pick and choose which comments are published on your site. I don’t think anything is wrong with deleting a comment that violate your comment policy. You don’t have to allow questionable sites take advantage. When you publish those kinds of comments you could potentially put your readers at risk, they might go on to think you endorse these sites simply because you are linked to them.
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July 30th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
Thanks Kiesha for sharing your input and opinion.
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July 31st, 2010 at 8:12 am
That’s why I’ve got this message on my other blog, right above the comment form that says
All transactions with commenters on this blog are @ your own risk. StrictlyOnlineBiz will not be held responsible for any transaction gone wrong.
Udegbunam Chukwudi@Blog Setup Service´s last blog ..How To Organize Your WordPress Posts In Categories
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July 31st, 2010 at 11:23 pm
I am not using the keywordLuv plugin because of these reasons. But we still get those comments from people who use keywords instead of their own name. These comments look genuine,and they even use gravatars. But the keyword leads to a website and not a blog. So the situation is almost the same with or without the keywordLuv plugin. I just use the NOFF and the CommentLuv plugins.
Btw, I just got a pop-up when I clicked on the comment form.
Sourav @ Tech N Blogging´s last blog ..8 Ways To Keep Your Readers Busy
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August 1st, 2010 at 12:05 am
I think this is a topic on must bloggers lips i get lots of spam comments on my blog telling that they want to use my post in their school project but as yo mentioned it is nice to reward commenters with the link luv so until we find away to top spammers completely what can we do
lawmacs´s last blog ..If You Can Believe It- You Can Achieve It
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August 1st, 2010 at 2:01 am
I used to love this plugin, and it was so useful to reward our commenters.
But since i do not have many commenters, i decided to remove it
And now, they tend to spams via trackbacks lol..
Kimi´s last blog ..Removing “You may use these HTML tags and attributes”
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August 8th, 2010 at 3:29 am
Do I need to set up this on all pages with PR or just on homepage? I have got a lot of smart spams a day and tired of removing them. Thanks
Tinh´s last blog ..AZBlogTips July Traffic and Income
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August 8th, 2010 at 10:48 am
The plugin configures on all posts automatically, not the homepage since most blogs don’t allow commenting from home pages.
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August 12th, 2010 at 8:08 pm
My blog only use comment luv not use keyword luv
Hieu Martin@Blog Tips´s last blog ..5 Tips to Use Digg to Drive Blog Traffic
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