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In one way or another I've had "dofollow" comments enabled on this blog for well over two years. In that time I've spend a good deal of time trying to delete the obvious spam comments while letting genuine stuff go through.
There was a time that I tried asking people to use real names instead of keywords in comments because I decided that if people wanted to use comments to get themselves a link that was cool as long as they'd use the name field for an actual name or handle. I don't *think* I was being unreasonable since I doubt that many people's mother named them buy viagra, diet pills, orlando vacations, payday loans, or make money online.
Unfortunately I ended up dropping that because it made for even more work because I had to moderate all comments and that was more of a pain in the arse than it was worth.
Recently it was brought to my attention that without doubt, a pretty fair number of the urls that people (or bots) have been using in the comments have been to what Google and other search engines call "Bad Neighborhoods" and that this could very well be a major contributing factor in the loss of page rank that I've seen on this blog in the last year and a half.
You see, about a year and a half ago this blog had a page rank of 4. Then over a period of about three or four months it dropped to a zero. It stayed at a PR zero for over a year until not long ago that zero was replaced with "unranked". Traffic from search engines has also dropped off over that year and a half to almost nothing.
I get it now that in trying to be cool and do something to help folks build their links and encourage commenting I've left myself open to being penalized for linking out to bad neighborhoods. Since there is absolutely no way on God's blue earth that I'm going to even consider going back to moderating all comments and checking each and every url in them to make sure it's not a bad neighborhood, I have decided to remove all "Dofollow" comment features permanently.
I tried being the nice guy and got the shaft for my troubles and now I'm done.
To those of you who have NOT been abusing the "Dofollow" and "commentluv" features, I am sorry. The spammers and comment bots have, along with this site's rankings and search engine traffic, destroyed any interest I had in fighting that war any longer. I hope that you'll all continue reading and commenting in spite of the nofollow comments.
Also, if you would like a link then by all means contact me with the details and we will see what we can agree to.
Technorati Tags: link spam, comment spam, no more dofollow, comment policy change, bad neighborhood
All the Best in your efforts
http://b6s.net/commenting-policy
I am going to be fairly ruthless when I spot something fishy!
Hope the commenting plugin makers will enhance their tools to include blacklisted domains somewhere in a central reporting database, that would get rid of the spammers anyhow.