The Value of Do Follow
Do follow is stealing my time. A couple of month ago I followed suit with many other bloggers and installed the do follow plugin on this blog. I was excited to be able to give some link juice back to my commenter’s.
But lately I had to ask myself the question on how valuable the do follow cult really is for me? I have seen a number of bloggers slowly changing their attitude toward do follow and many have resorted to remove the plugin from their blogs.
What I have found is that despite the fact that the plugin is there to “give back” to our valuable readers it has come to bite us in the bum.
The amount of spam comments I receive lately as well as sploggger trackbacks is astounding and also very annoying. Even though I do have anti-spam plugins installed there are still many that slip through and it is very time consuming to filter all those comments.
So I’m afraid that the do follow has to go! It seems to attract many spammers who cruise by our blogs and if they see the do follow logo they leave one comment only never to return again.
Quite frankly I can do without this and since this is counter productive to my working day as well I have decided to switch the plugin to “Lucia’s Link Love”.
It still attributes the do follow link to comments, but only once the commenter has participated several comments. The plugin allows me to set the threshold amount to whatever number I choose and this will hopefully get rid of those fly byes who are only here to serve themselves.
This post is to tell you as my valuable readers that you don’t have to worry since you comment often anyway so it won’t affect you at all. For all the others I say “sayonara”.
Monika
Technorati Tags: dofollow , dofollow plugin , the value of do follow
About the Author: I'm a passionate freelance writer and problogger. To further build my business I'm also in the process of building my own niche empire which pays me residual income.
YC | Nov 18, 2007 | Reply
Do you need to ‘moderate’ the comments for the Lucia plugin? If so, it should help. If not, spammers still send multiple comments linked to one URL.
I have never bothered to think too much about these plugins tho’. I just use the basic comment plugin. heh!
Trent Brownrigg | Nov 20, 2007 | Reply
Monika,
I think that’s a very good idea actually.
You’ll still get plenty of spam comments (that’s just the way life goes) but it should cut down and help free up some of your time for more productive activities.
Plus you still get to show link love to your loyal readers who will be back again and again.
Trent
Monika | Nov 20, 2007 | Reply
YC: yes, I do self moderate as i really don’t trust these moderating plugins. But the whole idea of swapping the two plugins is to stop spammers from even trying to get their foot in the door.
It just means less time spent moderating and hopefully less idiots who try.
Trent: thanks I agree with you. From what I have seen so far I can’t tell yet whether it will work, but there is always hope.
As for the link love, yes my loyal readers and commenter’s won’t miss out. The number is set on a value between 1-10. It is the spammers guess which one it is.
moneytalks | Nov 23, 2007 | Reply
spam and scam is the essence of internet. i don’t know how could we ever manage to stop them. even if we could reduce them a little bit it would be thanksgiving all year round. about that dofollow plugging just do what is best for you and your loyal readers. hope that lucia thing would work well for you.
Happy ThanksGiving!
bLuefRogX | Nov 28, 2007 | Reply
I’ve recently installed the dofollow plugin and while I have not noted an increase of spam per se, I have noticed an increased number of commenters using anchor text links instead of their nicknames to post comments.
sue Jeffels | Aug 9, 2008 | Reply
I trhink you have done the right thing here Monica, there are too many spammers who just want to leave a load of links, often to sites that have nothing at all to do with writing or legitimate work at home businesses.
Monika | Aug 9, 2008 | Reply
@ Sue: Thank you. I also had to remove the Lucia Plugin too as I found it too time consuming as well. Both of these Plugins didn’t perform in my eyes and since I removed them both the amount of spam has stopped and funny enough, the conversation has increased.