No NoFollow - Welcome Spam
August 7th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (1,537 views)Well, I can’t say I wasn’t warned about disabling NoFollow. I have just started to be hit by spam: one comment about every 5 minutes for the last 4 hours. That adds up quickly!
They only seem to be targeting one post: Wordpress - Taming The Advanced Editor. Obviously there is a bot which has picked up this post and is hurling comments at it.
I’d originally been hoping to avoid using Askimet as long as possible, because it does catch the odd genuine comment. However, it has now been activated and is working well.
I’ve also activated the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin. Last time I tried it, it didn’t work properly - it was not showing the numbers you were supposed to add, so there was no way to add comments. This now seems to be resolved, although I’m not sure how. Maybe just deactivating it (last week) and reactivating it (today) fixed it.
Hopefully this combination will protect me, but it’s clear I’ve now really got spam. No thoughts of backing out though.
Of course, I may be unfair in blaming disabling nofollow, as it’s been disabled for several days with only a slight increase in spam. I joined MyBlogLog in the last 24 hours, so maybe it’s related to that. I guess there is no way of telling.
Anyway, welcome spam!
Tags: dofollow, social networks, spam, wordpress plugins
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Hi Stephen
This domain is still pretty young so it’s probably more a case of the spam bots only just starting to latch on to you as opposed to no-nofollow. Spam bots don’t care about it that much, they are pretty much equal opportunity peddlers of c**p
No-NoFollow is maybe likely to make your blog more attractive to human spammers however, but with the defenses you’ve put in place you should be much safer from the bots.
I see Lucia has already been by, but you might want to look at her LinkyLove plugin if you start getting a lot of dummies leaving daft comments.
Good Luck, blogging’s all just moderate, moderate moderate………….
Hi, I’m reading via the Bumpzee No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community RSS feed.
I think Maurice is right, it’s probably more to do with a newish domain than taking off nofollow. I took off nofollow before I switched to a domain, and I still haven’t had a spam comment (aside from a possible paid comment a week ago or so). Then again, I have a blogger blog and not a WP blog, so that might make somewhat of a difference..
Sephyroth
http://www.sephyroth.net
I’m surprised you have so many spam comments… Hey today is my 54th birthday isn’t that cool I have lived so long. Well I’m happy about it and I am going to Red Lobster tomorrow plus a motorcycle ride to Chambersburg.. God Bless!
I now have zero spam! Askimet was catching it all, but I still had to delete it. Once I activated the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin, the spam just stopped (the bots can’t answer the question). So no work for Askimet at the moment.
Maurice, Thanks for your comments, they make sense to me. I’ve seen Lucia’s LinkyLove plugin, but at the moment, I am using another plugin which has a delay before nofollow is disabled. I asked Lucia if she could add that to her plugin, she said maybe. I saw a comment on her page which says: “Test time delay feature”, so she may be adding it.
Sephyroth, Thanks for your comments as well. Hope your spam levels stay the same!
Judy, Happy Birthday! I hope you have a great day tomorrow - Enjoy!
@Steve– the time delay is up and running on my blogs. I just like to let these run a few days before I zip them and inflict them on the world.
I don’t see an issue with askimet in general. I’ve just made checking the trapped spam section on my wordpress for genuine comments a daily habit and I think it works out pretty well. Don’t let spam push you away from using do follow tags.
Hi Lucia, I’ll be sure to check it out. It seems like a fantastic plugin and the time delay was the only thing I would have missed if I swapped before now.
I’m a little slow in answering because I’ve been in the final stages of testing my first plugin, DualFeeds, so I could get it out the door.
Hi Erik, I’m not going to let it push me away from dofollow. Actually now I’ve got the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin, nothing gets through to Askimet. I keep checking, but there’s 0 caught. It’s great!
Whilst this particular captcha isn’t the worst in the world, they can put people off from leaving comments.
I use a combination of Akismet, Bad Behavior & TanTan Noodles spam filter, which has reduced my moderation queue from 400 to about 4 a day.
Whatever gets the job done…
Hi Chris, Thanks for stopping by.
I agree that captchas can put people off leaving comments. I’ve seem some terrible ones! The Math Comment Spam Protection is pretty simple (1+8 etc) which is why I like it - I think it’s much easier than most of the captchas out there. I don’t think I would use a normal captcha.
I haven’t tried out Bad Behaviour or TanTan Noodles - I guess I’ll look into them (but with not much urgency, as I’m not getting any spam now). Thanks for the input!
i only had spam once on my blog. it was yesterday. a guy wrote me several paragraphs about this entry not being spam and stuff. but despite this comment i never had spam and i´m also do-follow. maybe it´s not that interesting to comment on my blog since i´m only pr1, but the actual comment page should be pr0 on everybody´s blog, shouldn´t it? so it shoul be rather useless to spam a blog. the only thing to promote your blog is to get a backlink on a high-ranked page - main page of course.
Hi Chilli!. Ironically, your comment was marked as spam and I had to pull it out of the Askimet queue! I don’t get much real spam - a couple a week at the moment.
I’m pr0 at the moment, but the point is, that I might not always be pr0. Same with the comments on posts - new post don’t have a visible PR rating until the next Google PageRank export for their toolbar, but they will end up with some sort of page rank.
If my site goes well, then if you come back in a years time, your link will still be here and this post will have decent page rank. Of course if my site doesn’t do well, then your link isn’t worth much. But the more links you have scattered about on dofollow sites, the better it will be for you. That’s why we get the spam.
i thing no nofollow is a good thing. fight spam not blogs. we all ned good pr and backlinks.
Hi Hoto, thanks for stopping by. No nofollow is a good thing for you and me! But I’m not convinced nofollow is a bad thing in general (in an ideal world).
The idea of considering links in calculating PR is that sites with a lot of links will have good content (many people think its good, so they linked to it). But of course blog comments allow us to link to our own site which distorts PR (we are linking to our own site instead of other people linking to it because it’s good).
This means that someone with average content can get a good PR by running around leaving links to their own site in dofollow comments. For PR to really reflect the quality of a site, it should only consider other people’s links to the site.
Of course, we don’t live in the ideal world and if I want to get my blog noticed, then getting links through dofollow comments is one way to do it.
I had the same thing starting even before I started using nofollow, currently a bunch of other posts are picked up in a similar fashion. It definitely adds up quickly in the amount of spam you receive but Akismet which you activated is a great sollution :). Have been using it with love for a long time already and saves me from an increasingly amount of spam.
Slevi, I’ve come to like Askimet as well, it’s just a pity it sometimes catches genuine comments. I highly recommend a maths / catpcha plugin because it stops the bots from even getting to Askimet. This makes it easier to process Askimet spam and check if there are any genuine comments caught.
I’ve had that same thing happen on one of my blogs a while back, interestingly enough most of the bots were posting links on a high PR post (and only that) for weeks. I had to manually delete every single one of them for days until my brilliant mind told me it was about time to put a stop to this and use a plugin.
I used a captcha thingy but that drastically decreased my comments, and even traffic I really would have preferred deleting the spam manually then loose most of my traffic.
Btw. The math plugin can be easily bypassed by a robot and if a lot of people start using it it wouldn’t be long before a coder spent a few minutes tweaking his robot.
I’ve seen people who swap the comments fields, change the name of the form component etc… to reduce spam. I’ve heard it was quite effective.
Hi Drunk Text,
Actually, I now think that a lot of the automated spam is trackback spam. I use the Simple Trackback Validation plugin and it cuts out most of this type of spam.
I still use the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin for non trackback automated spam. It allows you to change the name and id of the form fields etc, which should help make it even more effective than the out of the box settings.