After Darrens post revealing a “service” allowing unethical companies to buy Spam Comments Wendy Piersall has decided to put no-follow back on her links.
I am considering doing the same.
It’s a shame when legitimate comments will get the same link-condom as fake comments but sometimes when you get a lot of messages in your queue it is hard to spot the fakes from the authentic. I would hate to encourage a slimy service such as this by providing them with link juice.
What are your thoughts?
Do you comment just for the link and Google juice? Or do you comment to be part of a conversation? Are you going to switch off Do-Follow?
Let me know … in the comments …
Update:
Thanks for all your comments, I appreciate it. I needed to get your perspective and you came through incredibly. Just shows what a lovely bunch of people read my blog 🙂
I’m not going to take the cowards way out and disable the Do-Follow plugin. As many of you said, that is letting them win and is punishing the good people for the potential abuses of a few. I only had to re-read my original post on Do-Follow to realise deep down I had known what my answer should be, I just needed you guys to re-enforce that it was the correct decision.
A few people privately asked why this is such a big deal for me.
There are quite a few bloggers like me who came out of the early blogging time where blogs were a kind of distributed community medium. Community is a big aspect of blogging for me, my most treasured feature of my blogs is the comment area. I get real touchy about it. Probably way too much. I think Liz will be another person who shares this trait.
Many people treat the comments as a by-product, after thought, something that might help search rankings, “user generated content”. Not me. It is at least half the point of blogging as far as I am concerned. It is my main gauge that I am doing something right.
Fake comments are poison to this, but I guess in the end if they are well done, who is going to know? If an authentic comment is inspired by a fake comment, is any real damage done? I’m not sure I will ever have a great answer to this but I do know I value my real commenters and think they should get every benefit available to them.
So again, thanks! You rock 😀