So to summarize without retyping it all… we get lots of spam as well – and we use wpspamfree to block most of the automated stuff. Then we approve all the rest that askimet catches if people use a name and wrote a comment. We don’t allow people to use keywords, so we do lose a lot of comments every day from people who didn’t read the comment policy.

I’ll have to look into SK2 if it has those blacklists.

Yes, you’re right.
But then he would sign his comment with Matt Cutts and not Drabdesign.

Big difference!

Matter of name branding, recognition, expertise and authority!

EDIT: Poster DrabDesign sent me an email.
His name is David and he said he didn’t meant to be offensive.
It wasn’t. At all.
I just wanted to make clear WHY I would leave Matt’s comment in there.

But you can still leave a valuable comment, right?

It’s not how you found me, it’s what you’re leaving here. Here’s why.

I want to build a great community and I really would like you to particpate by posting good comments, in return for which you get a back link to -hopefully- more valuable info, because…

…new visitors are reading your comments too and may visit your site. You want to keep them there and the best way to do so is delivering great content or something valuable.

That will result in a snowball effect with a growing number of visitors returning to eachother’s blogs over and over again.

Rethinking Blog Comments: Much More Than Just A Quick Way to Get Web Traffic

I was the one to suggest Case to look into Disqus. I know it feels like you are making people to comment elsewhere. I was apprehensive at first at the idea of “hosting” my comments on another website. But at the end of the day all links from Disqus are pointing back at me.

They do a decent job fighting spam on my blog. I am sure it would be different on blogs like yours or Case’s.

I have not used SezWho, but I think Disqus is similar.

Just my 2 cents.

If you would use the DOfollow feature, the link back should go to an informative site. I don’t want to send my readers to porn, gambling, Adsense scraped sites, sales pages, etc. Do you?
But as you can see, I left your link in.

Really?
I just visited your blog at musclesweb.net/blog/. The latest post was dated April 29th, 2008.
I skipped through the three pages you have up there and only found 1 post with 2 comments, both without a link.

>>more comments makes your site look busier and that is the bottom line
NO, it’s not!
It’s the interaction you can achieve with your readers that’s the bottom line. Blogging is about building a community with true relationships, not about volume.

But…
you DO know what to put in your anchor text and your RSS feed links directly to a real estate site selling houses and condominiums in Germany.
That’s why I took your URL out of your comments. Prove me that you’re real and I’ll put it back.

I don’t worry about off-topic links, they still pass juice in some way, and I even allow anchor text on them if the sites are legitimate, and both readers and I can identify who wrote the comment without much effort.

I take a hard line, but then my community is important to me.

I know some people are switching to using Disqus – why not go all the way and force people to comment on FriendFeed, or do a Seth Godin and switch off comments.

The powerful side of dofollow is engaging your audience more, they link to you possibly, or stumble a post.
Every time you link to a dofollow WordPress blog, you get a pingback with your anchor text.

As far as off topic links, who cares, as long as they are not junk – every bit of juice helps people in some small way and very often gets reciprocated.

I have no problems giving backlinks as a small gesture of thank you for adding to the conversation on my blog. But you do have a point there about linking to spammy sites.

Incidentally, how do I check if I have a follow or nofollow tag on my blog?

Regards,
Evelyn

Evelyn, you have to look at the source code to discover if a link contains a ‘nofollow’-feature. If you use Firefox, there’s an add-on that will color these links pink. You can get it here: quirk.biz/searchstatus/
If you want to use DOfollow, download the plugin at: semiologic.com/software/wp-fixes/dofollow/

One liners are easy to recognize, link builders who work for clients are a more difficult breed. I find myself too suspicious sometimes, reason why some may slip through, but in general I recognize them fairly quickly.

And yes Vlad, I had that happen to me too. I tend to blacklist their domains in SK2.
I don’t mind scrapers that much IF they give the right credits, but so many don’t and that’s what I strongly disapprove of.

Another difficult one is from someone who leaves a great comment and a link to a totally unrelated site. What to do?
Cats have nothing to do with Internet marketing, but I know Darlene, so I left her comment in. Same applies to Brennan’s comment.
By the way Darlene, incoming links can’t hurt you. It’s the outgoing ones, those that YOU can control. That’s why this strategy is so tricky.

If I don’t know the commenter, I visit their site to see what it is all about and if I found their site to deliver valuable content, I left them in, like Trucker News. May have made a mistake here, but it still was informative content and the comment looked sincere.
Others linked to plain sales and affiliate pages and those were deleted.

On the opposite, linking to a squeeze page isn’t that bad AnneMarie, IF I know who’s doing that and expect him or her to deliver great info.
That’s why knowing your commenters is so important. Besides that, it builds your own network.

So yes Mark, it IS a double-edged sword and sometimes I really wonder why I’m doing all this. Difficult to handle, which makes mistakes unavoidable. But in general it’s also rewarding for the good commenters, which is appreciated by them.

Finally, I don’t use Akismet as my main spam fighter, because anyone can put you on the Akismet blacklist, while using SK2 YOU are in control. Read Andy Beard’s Akismet False Positives & Spam Karma Configuration.

I am not sure if you ever experienced this, but if you have ever written article for EzineArticles, chances are you may have been already targeted by the “spammy trackbacks”…

They write a post completely unrelated to your niche and then take the “resource box” from your article on EzineArticles to ping your blog. Just today I had an article about penguins pinging my web hosting blog.

I use to ignore those because the trackback notification would include just the “resource box” from EzineArticles, but I had recently went trough several dozens of these trackbacks just to discover that most of them are spammy. Great follow up Case!