I’ll be the first to admit I tried the spammy crap in place of my name thing, but got the point when my comments weren’t showing up. It’s a good idea show.

And I promise no more crappy comments from me

What if my last name just happens to be Carlos phentermine mesethelioma texas holdem?

isnt the link name “nofollowed” ?

what’s the benefit of having spammy/crappy name ?

And i see that the non sense comments might come from the fact that you have the top commenters (which is not (”nofollow”)

People want to get a backlink in the “Top Commentors” with the anchor text they want (not their name). So they just put that text in the Name field, and start posting crap. Then, they’d probably get a good backlink for the Anchor text on the Top Commentors.

John CHow actually encourages for his Blog.

Exactly, comments are nofollow but the top commentors are NOT. So people use spammy names and post 1 liners that are un-related to get on the top list in hopes of help inthe search engines.

I predicted this would happen as I have a change to the quality of the posts over the last few weeks. As you know we provide content services and we have been requested to post comments on your blog by at least 20 people (all of which we refused) . Keep up the good work!

It’s a good thing for you to clamp down on comment spam. Good riddens to them, they aren’t contributing anything worthwhile anyway. Your content is superior to many other websites out there and I appreciate your open attitude you provide for everyone from the little guy to the big guy.

Shoe, what is your take on the usage of top commentators plugin affecting comment’s quality? Sure it will increase the number of comments, but I often the quality of the discussion will go down.

Good move. I’m also curious as to whether you’ve linked a decline in quality since adding the top commenter plug-in.

Does this include some of the less-than-classy stuff you have to clean up around here? (I’m sure I miss a lot, but was just thinking about the Boothe Babe winner post.)

Well I delete them if they are worthless… I think if you were not moderating it would completely make the comments crap.

I hope you dont take my name as spammy. But certain people who are using a an EIGHT WORD sentence as their name should be removed. Thats just ridiculous.

your ok you talk atleast

I get that same buy viagra phentermine mesethelioma texas holdem crap on my blog to. It does get annoying.

agree

j/k

I agree that this has gotten out hand. I haven’t started banning people for it on my blog yet but I have considered it. I hate it.

As mentioned above, it got much more prevalent after John Chow started encouraging it.

If I deleted all the phentermine comments I get, I wouldn’t have any comments left. Well, ok, I’d still have the one from the semi-retarded kid that liked my Batman post on my comics blog.

Shoe, checkin in to make sure I’m safe. It is a keyword but I wouldn’t consider it spam. If you feel the need to change it feel free to change it to “SEO Refugee Blog”

Glad to hear it man as i thought it was funny the other day as one of the top commenters was a name about a clothing line or something like that.

BTW: The clothing line one is still rated!!! Pretty funny seeing a top commentor taking up two lines.

I’ve actually been seeing similar problems on my site. I use a 30 day window since my comment traffic isn’t as heavy as yours. But recently, I’ve been seeing people posting lame comments with spammy names anchor text. I’ve taken a similar stance as you. By the way, if you don’t like me using my site name as my commenter name, please let me know.

Dude, i’m surprised it’s taken you this long! I always pre-moderate my blog-comments, but then again you get more in one day than I get in a year so I imagine that would be too much of a pain.

I was using Top commentors for one of my sites and it was an amazing resource hog. I think it was because the top 10 commentors all had over 1000, and when we got a spike in traffic the server was blitzed. I took off the top commentor and things were fine.

Thank goodness. I thought this might happen when I asked the question

“Does he thinks the recent top commenters implementation on his blog has made the quality of the comments go up or down?”

on Neil Patel’s blog. I think you answered positively about it then on the show, but since then it’s gotten silly. Some people have no shame.

don’t worry..I never do that..You just too popular.

Blog spammers suck. I wish Akismet was able to pick up spamming the name section better.

Hope you don’t mean me! (of course I think Coopreme would make an excellent name for a clothing line!)

The benefit is that if you use a spammy name for commenting and you manage to get into the top commentators list, the nofollow tag is removed from your name.

Top Commentators plugins are controversial for established blogs like Shoe’s because they tend to attract spammy people looking for a easy, high ranking backlink.

New blogs want comments from anyone, so people tend to get away with it more on new blogs.

I can’t imagine how much additional work the plugin generated for you. Hopefully the increased number of page views will help you monetize it a bit, but I imagine that spammers do not convert very well.

I think the bottom line is not really what your commentator name is, but whether or not you arecontributing valid content to the discussion. There is noting wrong with a little organic SEO, but there is a line between contributing and spamming.

I dont comment here all that often but always click through to the site from my feed reader so cant really comment on the quality of comments

You didn’t complain about my comments when you were only getting no more than 5 comments a post. I demand to be grandfathered!

[...] my way of moderating comments has little similarity to what Shoemoney is doing at his blog. But did you that the disciplinary action he did for those doing that is more [...]

Good for you man, blacklist away.

I personally just delete commenters that leave stupid irrelevant one liners on posts.

John Chow was just encouraging people (kind of) to do this kind of thing. He even congratulated someone who was using two names on his blog.

Blog spam is utter annoying. Even with moderation the average volume of comments that a high profile blog gets makes it almost impossible to handle. I have sold a blog that generated reasonable income just because it got impossible to manage. And a blog that doesn’t allow comments doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

that is not always true, check TechCrunch for instance. I am not sure if Michael is moderating every single comment (even because there are some spam there once in a while) still the discussions is quite positive for the blog, and we are talking about 100+ comments every other day

What exactly do you consider to be ’spammy crap’? Are we able to place our legitimate site title in a comment, or will this result in us being ‘blacklisted’?

- Martin Reed

John Chow encouraged such a thing?
…
In a similar issue, I run an ecommerce store which has a comments section under each product. Normally this would be a great idea but there is no captcha or spam filter designed into the software. I could spend twenty minutes per day just sifting through spam.

I think Shoe might be referring to keywords as commenter names.. blog titles should be fine.. or not.

It’s not about monetizing the blog, Thor. It’s about making relevant comments.

Interesting. John Chow encourages and Shoe Money discourages. I really dont think the “name” is considered spam, but the comments could possibly be. Thats why I always write targeted, post specific, comments.

I would like to know exactly what you’ll be considering name spam. If I used “internet marketing blog” for virtualmarketingblog.com would that be ok? What if I used “virtual marketing blog” for virtualmarketingblog.com? Or are you saying both those are now considered spam, and you’ll only accept “dave”? Thanks.

Disclosure: My link is in the top commentators.

I think this is a good move, I don’t even understand why people bother with link spamming on blogs of this type. I would not feel right if I knew most of my backlinks were from unrelated blogs.

I understand you shoemoney I have it on my blog too…but most of the people who do leave a lot of comments actually have something to say when they do leave them.

I would guess that he’s also looking at the content of the comments–not just keywords in the name.

Even if your name isn’t a string of keywords, a random comment like “Hi. You have a nice blog” looks like spam. Especially if you Google the post and see that the same person has posted the exact same comment to 400 blogs.

A lot of people don’t share your morals. Especially people who spam. I’d guess they don’t care about where their links come from, as long as they get them.

putting up ‘Top Commentors’ can be a double edge sword

it can reward good commentors but also spammers love it

I’ve seen it on johnchow.com & various top blogs too … people inserting hidden link between the comments or just spamming with one-liner

dude, maybe you should put the html off in comments area

I think it’s a joke when someone comments as “Phentermine” or some other keyword crap like that, their intentions are plainly obvious and they should be blacklisted.

I use to do that type of stuff when I was young and the Internet was young but when you have your own website, it’s a different story and you realize how annoying spammers can be and how most people’s comments are artificial.

or maybe disable the top commentators altogether hehe

Great, I think I dont need my keywords listed anyway so I get stucked with my nick name in the Name

In last days I was wondering how many people spams or writes short, unmeaningful comments on your blog.

It’s much more incredible considering there’s not any seo utility in doing that, as there is the no-follow in your comments links.

Anyway I don’t know any good way for stopping such a kind of stupid comments on my own blog; I use a wordpress-based blog with the akismet plugin, and it only stops authomized spam.

I agree with you on everything you posted about this subject

I guess it’s time for a name change. From here on out, I’ll be known as Air Power Cordless Tool Guy. Ok, that’d sort of limit career choices in the future.

Seriously, though… are screennames allowed now? I’ve often wondered how long people are going to go by screennames. It became obvious to a few people at SES this last time why I always use my actual name when they had to explain who they were to people who should have known them.

Is my name ok

I’ve always used a screen name. Maybe that’s not such a good idea. While I haven’t been to any SES conferences yet, I might go someday. And I wouldn’t want to get blacklisted by someone as important and highly respected as ShoeMoney. So I guess I’ll let people know my name from now on.

For what it’s worth, I e-mailed the biggest offender with a warning and when their behavior didn’t change, I did a quick db search and flagged all their comments as spam. Problem solved since they can no longer get past Spam Karma.

Did I bet banned from the top commentors list or something? It seems like I should have enough posts to be on the list, and I was for a while, but then I disappeared.

Lol! Carlos I actually laughed out loud when I read this comment

We had a post series about using top commetator spots to drive traffic a while ago, and mentioned your blog specifically. Hopefully that hasn’t caused an influx of spammy one line comments.

We advocate comments that are on topic and actually ad something to the discussion, lest you incur the wrath of the author!

I think people would’ve figured out ways to abuse the system regardless of whether or not you mentioned this site in your article.

[...] I really don’t have a problem with good friends leaving keywords in the name field, although some others are getting a little ticked off by it. And of course, those of you who really add to the conversation earn not only a link, but my [...]

I’m also getting a lot of spam comments, mainly because of the do-follow blog roll. I hope this dies down soon because it’s to the point of being completely absurd.

[...] Others bloggers are equally miffed. eMums at Home is concerned that the Dofollow movement is getting exploited. Shoemoney said it frankly, stop the spammy crap. [...]

[...] 6. Spend more time [genuinely] commenting on other blogs:  This one is easy to forget in the push to create more unique, quality content, but it’s not something to lose sight of, no matter how successful your blog becomes. Building relationships with other bloggers is important, no matter what your Technorati rank is. And, when you comment, stop using those keywords you’re trying to rank for like “Las Vegas Real Estate”, and instead use your name. The Google juice you get from doing this on blogs that have turned off no follow is really not gaining you as much as you think it is, no matter how high the page rank is because the page rank passed to your blog is divided up among all the links on the page. Plus, it is really annoying to the blog owner and might even get you blacklisted. [...]

[...] it, but somehow that just doesn’t make me feel any less used and annoyed. I’m not the only [...]