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
