Lucia’s Linky Love Has Been Installed
As many of you know, I wrote a post awhile back entitled This Blog Is Now DoFollow. In this post, I talked about how I decided to make all of my comment links DoFollow to give back to my readers. I’d like to share my experience along with the changes I have decided to make. First up, the bad things:
Bad Thing #1: Large Increase In Comment Spam
Believe it or not, my comment spam has grown to the point of being a hassle. I have to moderate all of my posts before I can approve them. Even Akismet does not pick these up and there is a reason why. The reason?
The comments are made by real people, not bots. I have tried implementing the simple math plugin along with a simple captcha but neither of these worked because every comment passed.
Here are a few of the comments I am talking about:
- “Great Blog”
- “Useful content indeed, will be back”
- “Great posts I like it”
- “Love it”
The main reason I can tell these are spam is because the people didn’t even bother to read my post. Some of the comments I deleted were totally irrelevant to the post itself. I even had one person paste the same comment on three different posts!
Bad Thing #2: Being Listed On DoFollow Blog Lists
When I first noticed my blog on a DoFollow list I was pretty excited. I was like “yes, free backlinks!” I figured it would help me as I got listed on more and more lists. Unfortunately, the opposite happened. People started finding these lists and cruising through them leaving comments all over the place without even reading the posts.
As far as getting delisted, it’s pretty much impossible. Since no one really knows who created the lists in the first place. They just get passed around and more and more links get added to them.
The Solution (Lets Hope)
I am still a big believer in giving backlinks to those who visit my site and leave valuable comments. So I didn’t abandon it completely. Instead, I decided to go with the Lucia’s Linky Love plugin.
What the plugin does is pretty awesome if I say so myself. It allows you to give DoFollow comment links back to readers after they comment a certain amount of times. That way people cannot just stop by and drop a quick line and leave. If they do, their comment will have the Nofollow tag applied to it until they come back and comment a few more times.
I currently have the magic number set to… oops I decided to keep the number a secret. However, every reader that has commented on my blog a few times has nothing to worry about. Your comments have already been made DoFollow.
The plugin also lets you put the number of comments a person has made next to their name. Pretty cool!
Time For A Test Run
I already have everything implemented so it should be ready to go. I’ll make a post later down the road after it’s been up for awhile and share my experience after making these changes.
Have a great weekend! Be sure to come back on Monday for some new adventures…
This post was published on November 8th, 2008.
PS. Don't forget to check out Life After the Cubicle.
Great blog, I will be back. Very useful information indeed
Hahahahaha. You saw this comment coming Justin, I bet you’ve been thinking “When is that Dwayne guy going to post some smart ass comment on this post?”. Well here it is!
Dwayne.
http://probablysucks.com
Good business man. Everyone could use a little advertising.
Great tip Justin – I never had any experience with DoFollow – but will also have a look see trial run of Lucia’s Linky Love – cool name.
Awesome feature add and I am sure it will promote and encourage readers to comment. It made me comment
How are you doing Justin?
My thoughts on this are a combination of “oh, that’s too bad” and “people like to break things, get over it”.
I just read up on this DoFollow thing and it’s pretty interesting. I’m gonna implement the same thing on my blog and see what happens.
Good post.
Haha, just kidding. I have the same problem on one of my blogs. The ones that cause me trouble are the ones with OK comments but obvious spammy websites. For those I use a Delink plugin.
@ Dwayne: I new it was coming, haha.
@ Frank: It’s going good, glad to see you stop by and leave a comment : )
Thanks to everyone else for leaving some feedback. I think it’s going to make everything better. We’ll see how it goes…
You post information on your blog. Good idea.
I second that Mike. Who would have thought putting information on your blog would attract new users? I’m going to try this “information thing”. You’ll see
Dwayne.
http://probablysucks.com
Uber post.
viagra cialias etc.
Will be back for sure!
cool. i hope your comment spam decreases as a result.
i’m fine with this. after all, there’s no right to a comment based backlink, only a privilege.
I’ve never understood the whole nofollow thing. People want you to comment on their blog, giving them free content, but are unwilling to give you something in return. Smacks of selfishness to me!
Thank you for listing so many bad things. This is really wonderful and useful for the SEO’s.
Stuart – I don’t think it’s the blog owners’ fault. It’s google and wordpress etc who decided to add nofollow by default. Most people have no idea what nofollow is, let alone how to remove it.
Allowing no follow links is pretty brave. Something I wouldn’t do unless I had the time to moderate. However, unlike you I don’t have the balls to quit my office job and embark on a full time blogging career.
Good luck, from one Justin blogger to another.
Hey! This was just the plugin i need.
I’m glad you commented on my blog (also dofollow) so that i landed here.
Just subscribed to your RSS
Adam thanks for mentioning that link love plugin, that is absolutely brilliant
A4D
ooops I see it was Justin who made the comment about the link love plugin
excellent
A4D
This plugin will definitely help you a lot. If you don’t implement this plugin, then a lot of new viewers will only come to post a comment, and you will never see them come back ever again. People should comment because they truely like what you have posted, and they should not focus on just getting link juice. Adding the plugin is very good choice!
This plugin will change rel=”nofollow external” into rel=”external”.
Am wondering if “external” is still needed. Might affect Google’s pagerank as well.
Hi Justin,
I just installed Lucia’s Linky Love Plug In
On my blog.
I actually did a search for the Plugin and your site
was the top 3 in the search results for the search
term Lucia’s Linky Love. Thats awersome. Thanks
a lot for this post and the link to the Plug In.
Have a good one.
By the way Justin. The link for the plug in seems to not
be working. It is giving a Mysql error right now.
Justin, It’s ironic that many bloggers talk about going dofollow but then they actually use nofollow. Thanks for this project coz I too feel that bloggers should be rewarded for their thoughtful comments.
Hey, I have just found out about this plug-in, and I am wanted to incorporate into my blog. Although I have downloaded it, I just haven’t installed it on my blog yet. (been kinda busy) I heard that the only customization you can do is 3 to 10 comments before it makes them dofollow, is this right or can you pick your own number? Anyway, thanks for this good post.
Thank you for your clear explanation of the ramifications of linky love. I do LOVE the general notion of it…
You’ve had the LLL plug-in installed for a long time now. How is it working for you?
I also wish to know whether you feel this plugin really reduces your spam. Although I understand why people think it will I honestly do not see any benefit to it and I know that it confuses those who might become your most loyal readers and commentators.
Spammers leave multiple comments in my blog and I delete them before they ever go live even though I do not even use Akismet because it is banning excellent bloggers from commenting.
WordPress has a setting to not let any comment appear in your blog unless you have previously approved a comment in that name. That is all that is necessary to keep spam off your blog.
We are testing captchas to determine which is easy for commentators to use while keeping the most automated spam off our blogs. I keep asking and am still waiting for someone to tell me how exactly Lucia’s Linky Love and similar plugins are benefiting them.
Hey Gail, the plugin does indeed reduce spam a little. However, I no longer use the plugin. I approve comments myself instead, since it allows me to reply to people since I always get to see them before they go up. It does require bit more time, but I feel the end result is worth it.
Hope that helps!
I have to agree that approving each comment yourself is the best way to go. As Justin said, it allows bloggers to interact and get to know each other better. It’s not like bloggers are posting for no reason. They’re writing to or for their visitors.
quite a long timed post but still interesting article.. make us think what to do with our blog