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One of my blog’s frequent visitors leaves a lot of comments that only vaguely relate to the topic of the post and sometimes are blatantly comment spam ( Like “Don’t forget to visit my blog at XXX”… despite his blog URL already being clickable in his username). His behavior was enough that the server may have blacklisted his IP on the backend – he couldn’t access the site at all for a few days and I had to have tech support whitelist him.
He’s not a bot because we’ve actually exchanged emails in the past, mainly about the access issue, and every once in a while he leaves a comment that at least shows that he read the post.This particular blog has only been live for a couple of months and I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot by getting on a more established blogger’s bad side. But, while I don’t mind commenters linking to their blogs, I don’t like them to be so unsubtle about it. Plus, on the SEO side, the blog that he links to is not spam, but not the best quality and I wonder if the backlinks may impact my stats negatively.
What would you all recommend I do? Should I contact him and ask him to tone it down? Should I just let it be and edit / trash the really spammy comments?
Because 90% of the comments with links are spam, I take the link field off the comment form. If I could just get Akismet to understand that link = spam that would be great.
But if you have a link field on your form and a legit person fills out the form and links back to their own site – then it’s polite to let the link go through. But it’s better if you just take the link field off your form so it can’t be used in the future – especially if it’s bothering you. You can always add the link in manually when friends comment.
The additional text on the page can be good for SEO, and it makes the adult site seem more active and current to the spiders when they see the content on the page growing.
On the other hand, irrelevant and spammy comments will hurt your rankings. They can very easily decrease the value of your website in the Google’s eyes.
I have decided to approve comments with links if the content seems beneficial or interesting to my readers (I just hope they come back to me again).
I personally would not approve his comments and I would probably send him a email where I would politely ask him to stop submitting spammy comments.
Great feedback, guys. Check out my post on this issue at — haha, sorry, couldn’t resist.
DOC, I’ve been thinking of disabling the URL field, but I don’t entirely mind links in comments; it’s just that the comments need to be natural, or at least come off that way. But it’s a great idea to add them in manually for visitors who have proven themselves not to be spammers. I’ve already been doing that with account privileges.
MAA, that’s exactly why I wasn’t comfortable flat out deleting his comments, because the semi-relevant ones could provide some value and prove that my blog is active. The next time he makes a really spammy comment I will email him directly and advise him on making less spammy comments. I hope it won’t cost me a visitor though; I only get ~100 a day so I need all I can get.
One piece of advice I got was to set a minimum word limit for posts. That might help with this guy, but I have legitimate visitors who write three-four word posts that I don’t want to deter from commenting. Got a lot to think about here…
So here’s an update:
After a spam-free week, my favorite visitor came back with a vengeance. 18 comments, 13 of them in less than five minutes, and 10 of them including an extraneous link to his blog. Oh, and better, the server blacklisted him again!
That same day, I sent him a very polite email about his behavior and made it sound more like: “Here’s what you can do on your end to prevent the server from blacklisting your IP again” than: “STOP SPAMMING MY PAGE, MOTHERFUCKER!”.
He hasn’t acknowledged the email after two weeks, and in that time he pulled the same stunt again (only six comments this time, though).
His comments that time also made it unambiguously clear that he was a spammer trolling for backlinks. He would make a comment on a post, and if I didn’t approve it quickly enough, he would make another comment on that same post with the complete opposite opinion. Charming.
So nope, not approving any more of his comments, and next time he gets blacklisted, I’ll let it run its course. Probably going to remove some of his older comments that I did approve and definitely will remove the URLs from the username.
