Archive for the ‘DoFollow’ Category

L Linky Love is now being tested!

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

L Linky Love Comment Plugin is coming soon! It is intended to be a “dofollow” plugin on steroids, giving bloggers the ability to grant “dofollows” to their community of visitors while making it very, very difficult for human spammers to get “dofollows”.

This comment plugin is intended to give “dofollow” bloggers better control of the follows they grant.

  • Gives “DoFollow” to the author link after a visitor has commented a number of times specified by blogger. I permit the blogger to select a number of times between 3 and 7. (Note: The match criteria is matching email, name and url. )

    In my opinion, the lower limit of 3 is the minimum sensible number to thwart spammers; I plan to use this value. Any choice above 7 isn’t really giving out “dofollow” links.

  • Gives “DoFollows” to links in comments after a visitor has commented the number of times specified by the blogger. I permit the blogger to select any number at all, and also never grant “DoFollows” to links in comment text.
  • Only gives 1 dofollow to an individual visitor per post. That is: if the visitor makes 20 comments on one post, at most only the first comment qualifies for “dofollow”. The match is tested on visitor email address, url and IP address.
  • Stops granting “dofollows” on comments made more than 14 days after the most recent post was published. This will prevent a blog from becoming a link farm if the blogger falls ill and is unable to delete or manage their blog.
  • Will not give “dofollows” to any commenter who enters a name with more than 20 characters. This prevents people ‘named’ “Las Vegas Real Estate” or “Cashmere Dog Sweaters” from getting “dofollows.”
  • Runs before NoOldSpamLinks. This permits NoOldSpamLinks to overide anythign done by this plugin.

Even with these features, I suspect human comment spammers will still try to get “dofollow” links. However, to do so, they will need to visit over and over and make reasonable thoughtful comments and basically behave like real honest to goodness blog visitors.

I’ll be visiting to checm my blogs to make sure the plugin actually does what I want it to do. If you are visiting, you may see your dofollows turning on or off as I periodically test the controls and check the blog display. Don’t worry; I will eventually stabilize.

I will probably release this on Wednesday. Meanwhile, my blog posts will be sort of boring!

DoFollow List News: I’ve installed L’s Linky Love Development Version.

Sunday, July 22nd, 2007

Due to the birth of companies that provide human employees to post spam comments, many dofollow bloggers have been experiencing a lot of spammy comments. This is aggravating, and tempts many to abandon the dofollow movement.

I want to continue to give “dofollow” links to visitors who leave thoughtful comments and participate in conversations at my blog. I don’t want to grant “dofollows” to people who visit, leave truly stupid comments and drop irrelevant links in comments

For this reason, this morning I spent some time rigging up a “proto-plugin” that should to the following:

  • Generally, grants “dofollow” to comments after a blog visitor leaves their fourth comment with matching email addresses, urls and author names. Once a visitor qualifies, the dofollows are applied retroactively.
  • Exception: If a commenter left a name that is longer than 17 characters, they aren’t getting a dofollow on that name ever.

I’ll explain my reasoning for these choices on Wednesday when I have the first “real” version of this plugin available. (It will have a a user interface that lets individual bloggers tweak some choices. )

Meanwhile, if you are not a spammer and left a few comments earlier don’t worry about having lost your “dofollow”. Once you leave four comments, you comments will “follow”.

Oh… and let me know if you have any suggestions for plugin features. If I am aware of them, they are easy to code and don’t waste loads of CPU, I may include them!

Human Spam: How do you detect it?

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Both Darren of Problogger and Anna of “Geek Mom’s Net Journey” explained how companies like “Buy Blog Comments” are hiring human beings to enter spam that often flies past spam filters.

Because this is human entered spam, we dofollow blogs will likely see dozens a week rather than hundreds or thousands. In fact, I think we have all been seeing this spam. So I was wondering how others diagnose the human spam. Naturally, I’ll also tell you how I detect it!

How I identify human spam

When I receive a comment, if I recognize the person commenting or the url of the blog listed in the link, I know it’s not spam. So, the comment and link stays in.

After that, I ask myself a series of questions.

  1. Is the “name” given by the commenter an obvious SEO term like “Cashmere Dog Sweater” or “Search Engine Optimization”. If yes, it’s spam. I either strip the link or delete the comment. I might report it as spam. If the “name” is not an SEO term, I go to the next question.
  2. Does the link take me to an English language blog with original content and an identifiable author. Not spam: the link stays in.
  3. Does the link go to a blog that matches my niche in any language. If yes, it’s not spam: the link stays in.
  4. Does the link go directly to a merchant who sell something other than advertising? Got a shopping cart on your site? If yes, it’s spam: I strip the link.
  5. Is the site obviously a splog? Spam! Strip link.
  6. Is the link to a site in a language I do not understand? If I got to this question and it’s in a language I don’t understand, it’s 95% certain to be spam: I strip the link.

Questions 1-6 generally cover nearly all comments. However, as a tie breaker, and I ask myself two more questions:

“Is the comment specific and meaningful, and well suited to the conversational thread? ” If it is, I know the comment still might be spam, but it’s probably not; the comment and link stay in.

But if the comment is vague, I check the referring IP address for the comment. If it resolves to a country with very low wages, I strip the link. Otherwise, I flip a coin.

Are there any symptoms I’ve missed?