By now, you would think that people would realize that generic comments get deleted and very likely marked as spam. Most blogs run Akismet (we don’t), but WordPress still uses Akismet to flag comments as spam. Once you are on the “spammer” list your comments immediately either go to spam or get deleted.
Do you know what comment spam is versus how to comment well? Don’t comment like this:
Any comment that has a bunch of niceties one after another is going to get deleted by bloggers who are paying attention. If you want your comments kept, they need to be specifically about the post where you are commenting.
Any comment that could be copied and pasted into any other post and fit is going to be deleted as spam!Click To TweetYou might be a spammer if:
- You copy and paste what someone else has written into a comment. This is plagiarism and may cause you or the blog you comment in legal problems.
- You use a tool that automatically adds the title of the post into a comment. Just don’t do that!
- Your comment would fit in any post. Make sure every comment you leave is specific to only that post and topic or it is likely to be deleted as spam.
Do you hate spammers? Many bloggers at least believe they do. Hate only hurts the person who feels that emotion and does nothing to the object of your hatred.
What I realize that many don’t is that there are different kinds of spammers. While there are some who know they are stealing our time and energy, probably the greater number of people bloggers refer to as spammers do NOT know they are doing this all wrong.
ANYONE that comments regularly IS going to
end up being flagged by Akismet as a spammer.
If we just delete them they won’t ever know WHY or how to get better. It makes more sense to EDUCATE new commenters than to slam the door in their face. If I deleted YOUR comments are YOU going to come back?
When shopping we expect the door to be open to the store, right? If a business keeps their door locked and grills you on WHY you want in or asks for your ID or references would you still want to buy from them – or even get inside?
I would not. Deleting comments willy-nilly is telling your new readers you don’t trust them and you don’t want to even give them a chance to interact with you! Most bloggers are so focused on being anti-spam that they’ve forgotten how to be human!
Put yourself in the commenter’s shoes.
(And you ARE in that place if you EVER comment in other blogs.)
How would you feel if I mistook you for a spammer and deleted
your comment that you spent your valuable time writing?
UNINTENTIONAL SPAMMERS:
- Some are new bloggers trying to find their way who don’t know how to write high value comments – yet.
- Many have fallen for spammy syndication and link building plugins and strategies being taught by the get-rich-quick crowd.
- Small business owners struggling in a declining economy and being hurt badly by Google updates and desperate to save their businesses and keep food on the table are being sold ineffective SEO linkbuilding through comment spam solutions. They usually are NOT aware of what these supposed “experts” are doing.
All these people are NOT your enemy.
They are humans just like you or me trying to figure out how to survive in a faltering economy in perpetual decline.
Just today someone Skyped to me complaining about comments appearing in this blog. I delete far more comments than I approve, but I do approve many comments others bloggers would delete because I know what they don’t know:
Many of these comments are left by people I already have relationships
on social media so I KNOW they are not drive-by link builders!
Some of them are bloggers just like us who have blogs they are trying to use to generate an income, who work for SEO companies, or who accept client work.
Many of our favorite bloggers write great comments that we don’t think are spam even though there are doing the things many bloggers THINK are behind spam!
Bloggers are so tired of spam
that they are spam-trigger-happy.
What IS Blog Comment Spam?
To compound the problem, while most bloggers BELIEVE they know what spam is their definitions are all over the place. Here are some actual answers I have personally received from spammers regarding what spam is from most obvious to most surprising:
REAL COMMENT SPAM:
- Spambot generated comments ~ These are blocked by our GrowMap anti-spambot Akismet Alternative plugin which reduced by 96% the number of comments I had to moderate on this blog.
- Obvious spam because the comment has nothing in it specific to the post and is either an advertisement or a bunch of links.
- Trackback spam that looks like a comment but is auto-generated (Blocked by Simple Trackback Validation Plugin.)
- Phony Trackback spam that looks like a real trackback and is auto-generated, but either has no real link to you, or a link hidden in source code but not visible on the other blog OR has nofollow links in a mouseover section.
- Copied comment spam.
- Duplicate comments copied and pasted into posts manually.
- Manually written comments that have nothing to do with the post where they’re left.
COMMENT LINKS MANY BLOGGERS PROHIBIT, EDIT, or DELETE:
This section discusses links often prohibited, edited or deleted by bloggers and my position on what I allow or do not allow.
- Comments linking to sites in bad neighborhoods. For example, I do not permit links to ga mbli.ng sites including bi–ngo and cards or ad-u–lt content or to ph .ar a cueti cals. (The reason these words are in this post in that manner is to reduce the likelihood that my having mentioned any of those topics will trigger alerts and flood my blog with “related” spam. I avoid using those words in posts, in in comment replies and on social networks especially Twitter where using any of those words will generate auto-tweets and get you followed by spammers.)
- Linking to sales letters. Some prohibit links to ALL sales letters; others allow links to products and services they feel are ethical.
- Comments linking to anything promoting unethical get rich quick methods, or selling Twitter followers or Facebook friends. Because these can be difficult to evaluate many bloggers prohibit all sales letters.
- Links to a legitimate business ~ Even if they’re not in your niche they could be very interested and regular readers of your blog in any other niche. Everyone has multiple interests and most businesses ARE interested in social media, online marketing, and business blogging.
- Comments linking to blogs in other niches – While I encourage bloggers to primarily comment within their own niche, I do NOT consider comments linking to blogs in other niches spam.
COMMENTS THAT ARE NOT REALLY SPAM:
- Weak comments written by real readers who are sincerely trying to participate in your blog. These are virtually impossible to tell from weak comments left by spammers.
- Comments that are difficult to understand because the reader’s native language is not English because writing in a secondary language is very difficult and machine translations are often of very poor quality. Do you really want to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t speak English as their first language by deleting all their attempts to communicate with you?
- Comments left by someone who took the time to read your post and write a relevant comment.
There is NO WAY to know whether a commenter found
your blog because they were working on linkbuilding
or left a comment with a link because they are a
new or regular reader of your blog and
were interested in what you wrote.There is NO WAY to know which came first:
the interest or the comment with link.
Every time you delete a comment you are slamming the door on an attempt to communicate. While we DO want to discourage spammers it makes more sense to teach others how we want them to comment than to delete them. What can they learn from THAT?
Many bloggers are making snap judgements about comments being spam that are NOT spam. I know this because I know most of my readers on Twitter BEFORE they ever comment – and most of their first comments are JUST LIKE the comments spammers leave!!
Many bloggers delete ALL comments that link to businesses.
WHY are you doing that?Real people just like us own those businesses.
They are the solution we need to more jobs,
a better economy and a higher standard of living!
What many bloggers are doing is slamming the door in the faces of a huge percentage of their real readers. If you use Akismet and don’t moderate everything it puts into spam THEY are slamming that door for you.
If you use Akismet, use GASP to block 96% of the spam Akisment misses that is spambot generated so you can FIND the real comments in your spam folder.
Many of our regular readers are consistently flagged as spammers
by Akismet because SOME bloggers flag almost ALL
the comments they ever receive from ANYONE as spam.
THESE ARE NOT COMMENT SPAM!
Here is what bloggers have personally told me they flag as spam:
- “Comments that link to ANY business.”
- “Any comment from someone I don’t already know”.
- “Any comment I don’t like.”
THAT is why Akismet can never work well. Read in their own words how Akismet works. They mention that hiring people to comment is ” exploiting low-paid workers” but that is NOT true.
We all need to get clear on who is exploiting whom.
Hiring people in other countries because the difference in the value of their money and yours or the difference in the cost of living allows people to live well on less money does NOT equal exploitation.
All people anywhere deserve to be paid
a living wage to do ethical work.
The solution to the declining standard of living is
to support small businesses because money
we spend with them stays in circulation.
SPENDING MONEY WITH SMALL BUSINESSES:
- Is almost immediately reinvested in the economy locally and in the economies of their suppliers.
- Pays their employees wages they can actually live on.
- Is spent to buy products they sell us – and if they are wise they buy from other small businesses.
- Pays taxes that support services communities need.
WHY I DO NOT BUY FROM CORPORATIONS or BIG BRANDS
None of what I wrote about small businesses is true for multi-national corporations – the big brands most people support. This holiday season and throughout the year I implore you to really understand how changing where you spend your money can save YOUR standard of living.
Big Brands pay far less in taxes. Some pay none – all pay less than almost anyone reading this or any small business. They squeeze their employees and suppliers dry and keep squeezing. They intentionally endanger their employees lives to maximize their incomes.
The profit from the money you spend with them is taken out of circulation, paid out in obscene bonuses to the already wealthy, and hoarded in overseas tax shelters. THAT is the reality.
The “illusion” we’re sold to justify all manner of green and
corruption is that we should all be striving to get rich, too.
Those who buy into that illusion defend horrendous behaviors like the Enron VIDEO employees bragging about how they stole money from little old ladies by intentionally causing unnecessary blackouts to increase their stock earnings.
The defenders of our current economic system claim this was an anomoly. I disagree – that is business as usual for most publicly traded companies. As Dr. Jeff Schweitzer , a recognized ethics expert writes:
Wall Street is a casino rigged against investors
sold false hope by unscrupulous companies
sanctioned by government to deceive and bilk customers.
It is time for those who still believe in the illusion of “The American Dream” to finally wake up to the fact that is IS only an illusion. I compile my proof for that claim in my post about Why Small Business Can Not Afford to Ignore the Occupy Movement.
It us up to US to stop supporting unethical activities.
We can start by not promoting Amazon who chose to have ambulances stand by to cart away their employees who get heat stroke – a totally unethical “solution” when they should have FIXED THE CAUSE! (Here is the alternative to Amazon I am supporting – and there are many others.)
The solution to finding what you need online is blogging communities – collaborations of bloggers who recognize and work with the other quality people in their niche and location.
We need to teach each other to create geo-targeted blog collaborations
and/or group blogs that work together and welcome local and
related small businesses into their blogging communities.
I provide free mentoring to bloggers and small businesses and share best practices and tips for those who prefer the do-it-yourself method. (I encourage even them to contact me for greatest benefit.
BLOGGING RESOURCES:
- Blogging Ethics: Time to Choose
- WHY you should start including local content on your blog.
- Blogging Collaborations Best Practices
- Twitter for Business: How to Geo Target Twitter for Local Small Businesses
HOW TO SUPPORT SMALL BUSINESSES:
Use these to help your favorite local and online small businesses to STAY in business and to share with your customers so they can help YOUR business stay alive.
- How and Where to Write Business Reviews for Your Favorite Small Businesses
- Why sharing our favorite small businesses through word of mouth improves our standard of living
- CommentLuv Your Way to Business Prosperity
Gail Gardner
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I agree and I like your post. I really do. You are understand those who blog for a living. It doesn’t mean you put a link in a comment, you’re a spammer. Spammers are those who comment without reading your post and is only there to use your post for their sake. They also need money but they should also think about the writers who want to hear a true comment about their article.
I am also intrigued about the issue of amazon. Do you have a link regarding that? I would really appreciate it.
Best wishes to your blog and more power
A lot of people do spam which is really irritating! Though I have to agree that sometimes, many sincere commenters who only comment like “Nice post” etc. are not literally spammers. Well, I guess everybody should learn how to comment high quality ones!
The status quo is that there is anti-spam paranoia in internet hurting legit users. It hardly stops professional spammers. I believe it is rather beneficial to them
For me the most sorrow is not when I am banned,blocked or hindered from blog commenting but from registering. participating in technical forum, discussion boards.
So, I’d like to address the same to forum webmasters and developers of antispam plugins in general.
Here is one of my (somewhat fruitless) posts in a dispute with developers of anti-spam protection:
http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=2122697&p=13103784#p13103784
I am having a dispute with
We are all to a certain extent a kind of “spammers”, but – here you must distinguish: bad onece with a “good site” comment, and good ones, which do contribute to your site and uses the key words you need in their replies 🙂
This is a very professional way of looking at comment spam. I really appreciate the amount of thinking you put behind deciding spam. Most people are quick to consider something spam, or not understand that it is a human behind it trying desperately to make it. That maybe they don’t understand what they are doing wrong, yet. Looking at it this way will ultimately provide the best experience and success of everyone.
Its a nice and informative post.But I feel that blogs are awesome platform to build two way connection.The blog owner gets benefits through its website while commentators can have a link to their website..So whats the harm.Not all the commentators who leaves link of their business are spammers..Don’t you think that.?
I myself was tolerable to comments deleting only dupes, links to explicitly malicious sites, hardcore porn, etc.
Unfortunately, it just attracted even more low quality comments and commenters.
The last drop was when people whom I myself consider spammers (maniacally publishing and republishing nothing except technical texts on SEO and backlinking, which nobody is reading) started to accuse me being spammers by promoting spam (by leaving funny comments in my blog)
For example, I liked a lot a phrase:
“I eat whatever and it always works”
with links to “whatever”:
– shoes
– condoms
– antivisruses
– diets
– etc
I see what you are saying. I personally think that one of the problems is that blog commenting is unfortunately away to get backlinks and too many people are taking advantage of it. In fact Google is looking out for that kind of thing. It should have never been an option to begin with. I don’t have that kind of problem with my blog thankfully.
Hi Steven,
You have fallen for the silly nonsense of the Google Fairy. I disagree. Why should I not allow my regular readers who take the time to comment to share what they do or what interests them?
You are opposed to real people in blogging communities building links between related content and using them to offer information that could benefit us but you are promoting SEO Link Monster which
does what exactly?
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t believe that link building is bad except when it is good? Leaving a quality comment deserves a link a lot better than these spammy phony trackback generators – and given that no one seems to want to share what it is that SEO Link Monster does the likelihood that it is yet another of those is high.
Is it ok with you to spam other people’s blogs – as long as YOU don’t have that problem? See my posts about Blogging Ethics and the one I’ll put in CommentLuv in this reply.
growmap would love you to read ..For Bloggers Who Hate Comment Spam
Hi Growmap,
I’m sorry you felt I was spamming your site. My intention was never to disrespect your feelings on this matter. I will humbly ask you a question. How do you know the rest of these readers aren’t spammers? Most of them have links back to their sites.
I have taken time to subscribe to your messages plus answer. Is that the true action of a spammer? Again I’m sorry. Keep up the good work and I am going to read the other article you recommended. Have a great night:-)
for bloggers who hate spam,commentluv premium is the only plugin made for them!
alan would love you to read ..Google Page Rank Update November 2011
I have a few comments on my blog. For me its really difficult to find whether they even read the post. All my comments are no follow , so I’m being liberal eventhough most of my comments are just wishes.
Hi Gail,
Most people probable have spammed at some time in their lives. I get quite a bit of spam myself keywords in the name tag, trying to stick links in the comments etc. I sometimes even go to the shop that put the link their and email them that they are harming their website. Maybe thats being too nice but I agree, some people are victims of these scams. It is time consuming but I was ignorant at one time too until I read a ton of blogs including this one and I try to be a better Internet citizen.
Nik
Nik would love you to read ..Are you Overworked and Stressed?
This is a really good post. I’d like to comment on what you said about not knowing whether someone found your blog in order to linkbuild or not. I agree, and I’d like to add, does it really matter? As long as someone is adding value to the conversation, should it matter? I’m sure many of us have initially been attracted to a blog or a forum where we can promote our own services. The way I see it, it’s a give and take situation. I find that blogs and forums that encourage self-promotion (obviously within reason and only when the person adds value to the site in question) tend to do well in the long run, provided they are moderated well.
Having just started my blog in the last year, I’m starting to see a huge amount of these trackbacks and comment spam types you were talking about. I guess it’s unreasonable to expect anti-spam software to manage to block out everything while allowing through the genuine comments. There’s nothing like a human going through them personally.
I always reply to comments on my blog, so it’s not a huge problem to go through them one by one but it does take time.
Rachael
Every blogger hate spammers,because they waste their time and concentration.
Having read through (and deleted) thousands of spam comments on my blogs I can tell you the vast majority are mass posted by automated systems that do a poor job mimicking humans. Luckily the WordPress spam plugin catches most of them. The ratio of spam to actual comments varies post to post, but there were times when I had to delete 100 spam comments for every genuine one.
I actually came across this post yesterday night but I did not have time to write an elaborate English version of my Spanish thoughts 😉
I do agree with you and your tone in almost everything.
About blogging -I’m fairly new in this world- and spamming, I would point out my view. What we are having here is a conversation (same as a “real life” conversation), and when somebody is speaking out (whether we agree or not with the point) he/she should add value to the conversation or listen (read in this case). It’s really easy to spot when a somebody has read the post or not. Needless to say when the comment is been automatically generated.
As you say, people are prone to flagging controversial comments as “spam”, because it is convenient for them not to engage with the debate. A lot of people have deleted my comments because they disagree with them just a little bit. It’s quite shocking! I’ve received some offensive messages in response as well.
The worst part of all of this is that my comments could spark some genuine debate on the blog’s comment thread, whereas all the insipid praise that gets through (with names like “Diamond Veneer” and “Gold Foru” – sigh) is far more like real spam.
Still, I take your point. Even content-free commentary shouldn’t be deleted if it’s not inconveniencing you.
Hi Gail,
OK, you got me and now I feel guilty. There may be one or two comments that I have deleted which may not have been spam. I’m going to have a look, just to be sure. I left you two replies over on my blog too. Thanks for the education.
Hi Frank,
Believe me when I tell you that figuring out what comments are spam and which are real is a never-ending challenge because like most con artists, many spammers are really good liars and many real commenters write very simple – what many bloggers who tend to be accomplished writers call “weak” – comments.
There is so much to learn about blogging, social media, business and life and only a tiny minority that really care enough to study them all. Sometimes we are going to end up deleting real comments in error and other times we’re going to allow comments that we later realize are spam. Either way the world won’t come to an end and in the grand scheme of things life will go on.
I welcome you as another seeker of wisdom who will share it with your readers. The more people we can get to understand the importance of supporting local and small businesses the faster we can slow the effects of the mainstream economic collapse.
Those who realize the mainstream economy is a shell game and they are the marks can stop playing someone else’s game and focus on what is really important in life which is NOT getting rich or famous or buying more worthless junk.
growmap would love you to read ..Twitter for Business: How to Geo Target Twitter for Small Business Local Social Media #smallbusiness
Wow Gail, once you start writing you just can’t stop, can you?
As most times a very passionate post.
In some cases it is hard to see what is spam, and what is not.
Some sites have really pissed me off by not approving a comment I wrote.
Probably because of my link having nothing to do with the niches that I comment in. But just because I do something in a different niche doesn’t mean I don’t have an interest in other niches. I put my heart in most comments, I try to add value, because I believe I have value to add.
If I wrote comments on blogs about my links niche, it would probably be fair if they marked my comments as spam because I am not nearly as interested in that niche as I am in for example this niche.
Btw. I read the post behind the redwritinghood image, and I can suggest it to everybody. It’s a beautiful and recognizable post.
Danny would love you to read ..Black & Decker NPP2018 18-Volt Cordless Electric Pole Chain Saw
Hi Danny,
You and your business are the perfect example of what I mean: someone who combines reading and commenting in blogs with building relationships and awareness for their business and gaining incoming links at the same time.
EVERYONE – every blogger and every business – should be doing that!
Intelligent people have more than one interest. Just because someone sells one thing does NOT mean they don’t read or do anything else! Every business should be interested in learning more about marketing – and they better if they expect to survive as the economy continues to decline – and it WILL until we take it back from big brands!
Don’t be too hard on the bloggers who haven’t realized this yet because in America schools teach almost nothing about business and most of the general population has no idea what it takes to be independent instead of having a J.O.B. (Just Over Broke) and a slave to others.
I do my best to raise awareness and get bloggers to see that what they really are IS a small business and we all need to support small businesses as a way to improve the standard of living for people everywhere!
growmap would love you to read ..CommentLuv Premium Plugin: Reviews, Benefits, Where to Get It and WHY You Want It
Hi Gail,
You’ve echoed my sentiments in many of your points. Moderation takes up so much time but I still believe it is worth it to not penalize those new commenters who are brave enough to say something and not discard businesses whose owner has taken time (or paid someone) to share a thought.
As you know, I, too, take a hard line with spammers and have written about it. I am determined – like you and others we know – to find a way around them so we can enjoy the dialogues we encourage.
Thanks for sharing the small business resources and continuing to encourage blog owners to engage in meaningful, local collaborations.
Hi Vernessa,
It is up to us to lead the way and believe me it means so much to me to know that you and a few others are dedicated to doing the right thing even though it is always far tougher than taking the easy way out!
growmap would love you to read ..Google Personalized Search Results: Blinkers On? How to Remove Them by Getting UNPersonalized.
This was a very nice article. I am completely agreeing with your post. Deleting spam comment has become one of the necessary things for the bloggers, but it doesn’t mean that bloggers must have to delete the comments which are not a spam. So a clear checking must be done on every comment before its publication.
Hey Gail,
I really like your approach towards comments and especially unintentional spamms. You are absolutely right though, When I started my journey a few years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I simply did what so called “gurus” told me on forums and other blogs. I used softwares to leave comments quickly and so on.
Now that I look back, i am ashamed of it, but at that time, I really didn’t know I was actually spamming, I just thought its the way the game is played.
So, now on my blog, I do give a lot of commentators who may unintentionally be spamming a second chance and sometimes I even email them and tell them about it and how they could do it the right way.
Very well said! Some bloggers were deleting comment which they don’t actually know whether its a spam or not. That’s why its called comment, it is something related to the post (even if its a violent reaction :P)
Stanley would love you to read ..Hello world!
I also know of bloggers who have tweeted about deleting any comments that link to a business even if the comment is relevant and thoughtful. It’s a bit ruthless. You have a great attitude about comments that I appreciate.
Very nice article! I can somehow relate with your post.. After spending minutes reading the blog and leaving a comment, you’ll notice it was deleted (who would be happy with that?) I’m no position to hate this bloggers, they should give a chance for everyone to participate in the discussion.
Hi Gail,
I applaud your support of small business owners and your fight against real spam. Every blog owner should listen to their conscious in relation to which comment they will delete or not.
I personally don’t delete a comment just because it says ‘nice post’. I have found real genuine people saying that and I don’t want to ‘Throw the baby out with the bathwater’ so to speak.
All the best,
Eren
Eren Mckay would love you to read ..How to Register a Domain with Name Cheap
I really enjoyed reading your article, for the human commenters that they are not able to write high value comments it doesn’t bother me I will edit the comment and approve it. The only thing that drive me crazy is spam bots they post a comment with many links about “viagra” and things like that but after installing GASP I am just chilling 😛
[Rescued your comment from spam where WORDPRESS put it. Aksimet has been deleted from this blog but WORDPRESS still throws real comments into spam which is the only place they let us put blacklisted crap which forces us to moderate the spam folder. We need to replace Automattic’s WordPress with one they can’t manipulate because they can’t be trusted.]
What a great post! I think that many people really don’t differenciate spam generators and real comments. I “very agree” that comments that you simply don’t like are not spam… So, let’s be gentle and not clean each simple comments 🙂 Let people express their opinion…
It`s less about how good the commentator`s English is, and more about the red flag raised i the second that he enters a website within the trigger.
The best solution for those who wish to block any spam in their blog, is really just block “Website” form, and HTML within comment form.
That way no blogger can complain, and the less need of Askimet will be in use.
Aviran Zazon would love you to read ..הקמת אתר אינטרנט – אתר מכירות
I hate it when you get those comments that are KIND OF real comments but also seem weird. Can’t tell if it is a spam post or if the person just doesn’t speak terrific English.
Larry Lourcey would love you to read ..Face The Music
Commenting is one of the most abused technique for link building process. However, many still consider to send out crap comments for their own benefit. Like what I read from a blog, he defined SEO as building links so quality isn’t that important so they care less with the quality of links, but rather focus on the quantity. That reason perse gives us the clue on how they find commenting as a must.
Christina would love you to read ..Step2 Naturally Playful Storybook Cottage Review – A Playhouse With A Charming Design
I find this post very interesting and also very helpful. I’m a blogger myself and hate spammers as what most or many of the other bloggers feel. Knowing the things behind spams is very important. It could help you prevent one of them in the future. Learning about what is or is not a spam is significant, too. Thanks for sharing this truly magnificent article.
Hi Gail,
Vert good post.Spammers are the bane of the bloggers life.It is time consuming reading spam comments,and then having to delete them.
I have had so many spam comments in the past it almost stopped me posting on my blog. I have since bought CommentLuv Premium and this has worked to weed out about 90% of spam comments. I would highly recommend it
Davi Cornick would love you to read ..Iconic Destinations and Its Attractions of Holiday in India
This is one of the detailed post on comment post I have ever read. I used to face a lot of problems with automated comments on my blog. Taking away the website field did indeed help reduce the number of spam comments. I was looking at updating my blog comments to CommentLuv.
Cheolsu would love you to read ..Facebook December
Hi Gail,
Epic post and so close to my personal way of thinking. I’m reflected in several points you’re talking about.
I can’t believe some bloggers delete links to business, I delete them only if it is illegal or link to a bad neighborhood.
I’ve done several posts about this theme, and it’s evident from their countries of origin, that many don’t have English as native language, so the grammar can be bad (this would be my case, as my native language is Spanish)
Deleting because doesn’t agree with you, no way – only if they are rude or similar.
I did the mistake of mentioning “bad-spammy” words in posts and you’re right, checking my stats the spam raise due to this motive. I’ll have it in mind 😉
I’ve done a commenting-social networking policy to express clear what I allow, or not, in comments and it’s at the end on the comment form on my site. More clear the ideas, is much better 🙂
Also, I’ve done a post specifically to allow bloggers and business-people to promote themselves without the “normal” restrictions related to spam. I’m linking to it on my Commentluv link.
Have a great weekend,
Gera
Hi – I was so relieved to read this post! I am a VERY new blogger and have received a few brief comments from people that had been logged as potential spam – apart from one, none contained any links inside the posts. I made an executive decision to ok them, apart from deleting the link, and replied to them all – I reckoned I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of engaging with potentially genuine visitors.
Best wishes,
Sue
Hi Gail!
I partially agree with you and I have changed my mind against the spammers who don’t even know the meaning of spam. I was ever not against the comments which have poor English because even I am not perfect at it but Gail you can have soft hard for the criminals who don’t know what they are doing is crime but how can you let go the criminals who know very well what they are doing, who have a destructive mind and always look for their own benefits rather than believing in care.
I wholeheartedly agree… I have seen bloggers develop an almost adversarial attitude toward some commenters which seems contradictory to me. Each blogger would like to have more site visitors and commenters and smart bloggers even provide incentives like CommentLuv to encourage comments. I may not know all the intricacies of blogging etiquette but I appreciate each blog I learn from and comment on. I have been filtered out a few times by spam software or perhaps even by the blog owner and it leaves a very sour impression after leaving a sincere comment. Bloggers should be careful not to take site visitors for granted… there are many many blog choices… just as in any consumer driven industry.
Hi Gail, thanks for writing this post. I find that there are many bloggers who are confused about this and here’s why. Some bloggers target CommentLuv and DoFollow blogs simply because they want backlinks. They don’t bother to read our posts and they don’t spend any time leaving thoughtful comments.
Many bloggers are pressed for time and don’t want to spend it going through the comments to determine which ones are legitimate and which ones are trash. Because I get a huge number of comments on my blog I can see how some find it difficult to find time for moderation.
Thanks for sharing some guidelines to help bloggers who are confused by this.
Ileane would love you to read ..Promote Your Guest Posts The CommentLuv Way [Video]
Hi Gail,
This article has strong points regarding spam comments, many of the business owners who have experienced being blocked by the Akismet because of the comments that marked as spam even it’s actually not. There are things to consider first before we put a judgement on the comments given and must not only depends on the Akismet tool. There are decent comments that also been blocked and we must consider them.
I agree with Anchal, Its very difficult to figure out the spammers. Also we should not discriminate any commenter for their english because all bloggers are not from the english country. But Yes We should take action for the actual spammers.
I also hate spam comment.They all wanted backlinks from our sites. That is good but their link decrease our SEO reputation.IF they didn’t make spam then comment is good to published.
Great points, I have seen many comments on blogs where commnetors have poor english and the main reason is there native language is different and we should not discriminate them at all.
There are many people who do spamming in a decent manner that nobody can detect them, so I feel it’s really difficult to figure out spammers.
What I usually do is replace the name they put in with their real name instead of their keywords and then remove the link – if they comment something as shallow as ‘great post’ or ‘thank you’. Coz, who knows, it might just be heart-felt. Haha! Who am I kidding…
Great post! It really echoed my sentiments. Some blog owners or website owners automatically delete comments just because the comments started with ‘Nice post’, ‘I like your post’, etc, without even bothering to read the rest. It’s a good thing you are not one of them. Some commenters do not just comment because of link building — they genuinely want to show their appreciation for the posts and share their opinions, too.
Thank you, more great posts to come =)