Moving to 'Do-Follow'?

Written By Katrina Gallagher

Katrina’s work has been recognised by industry peers, with a Big Chip shortlist for her work on ContractStore in 2008, and The UK Wedding Shows in 2010, and the award for ‘Best Use of Search’ for her campaign for The Little Greene at the 2009 Big Chip Awards.

• http://www.goodwebpractices.com David Towers

  Hi Katrina,

  I think going follow is a good idea. It encourages people to post and rewards people for their interaction in your blog.

  One of the reasons I personally started posting and getting involved in the alledia.com website is that the founder Steve Burge changed all his blog comments to “follow” and also rewards the top posters with a link from a PR 6 page. Check out his blog post about it:

  http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-seo-ebook/seo-ebook-winners-and-free-pr6-links/

• Ben

  I wouldn’t bother. After this article was released

  http://ocaoimh.ie/2008/02/27/how-to-successfully-spam-blogs-and-how-to-fight-back/

  my blog had loads of people with funny names posting generic comments. I edited the website field out of my comments template because of this. I don’t get many comments now but at least I don’t have to go through deleting spam.

  Suppose it might be worth a try for nothing but I would recommend getting a good captcha. I use http://www.theblog.ca/anti-spam That Akismet has too many false positives.

• Katrina Gallagher

  Thanks both, the pro’s cons and examples you’ve given are really handy.
  The capatcha is definitely a good idea as our inbox is spamtastic at the moment anyway. So hopefully if people take the time to comment, they won’t mind getting past the validation…
  Will let you know how it goes!
  Cheers,
  K

• Roy Wilding

  @Ben – I’ve always found Akismet (as long as it is kept up to date) great with very few false positives getting caught. I would estimate in the 3 years we’ve run this blog I’ve spotted a handful amongst the thousands of legitimate spam comments its caught.

  My personal feeling of captcha is that it’s just one more form field that as an end user I could do without. Blog should be all about encouraging comment and we should make it as easy as possible for the end user to engage with us.

• Ben

  Hi Roy

  If you have spotted a few legitimate comments in thousands of spam comments then you must have gone through those thousands. Thats the most annoying ratio. If it was every other, you’d check the spam but 1 in thousands, you wouldn’t bother.

  I don’t use a captcha like Googles or MSNs which are hard to read. The custom-anti spam I use is easy to read. I filled mine with 5 letter dictionary words. Check it out. http://www.theblog.ca/anti-spam

  >>Purposely no obscuring techniques so that the anti-spam word is easy to read

• Katrina Gallagher

  That’s miles better than the Google Captcha, which I have to admit hating with a passion!