Do The Dofollow
Posted by Paul Woodhouse at February 15th, 2007
Whilst I’m boring you on the subject of blogging, I’d just like to tell you about a few plugins I’ve installed to fight the good fight against splogs and spam, which impact some of you in terms of commenting and reading via RSS.
- Dofollow Plugin
I’ve never liked the idea of rel=”nofollow”. The easiest way to stop comment spam is to turn on comment moderation. Stripping the benefits of a bit of pagerank from the odd link in a comment wasn’t the way to do it and has hardly stopped spammers in their tracks. Besides, who’s going to whine about comment moderation other than those who have too many comments to plough through in the first place? The lucky swines. The rest of us need as much help as we can muster.
[Dofollow plugin here] [13 Reasons Why Nofollow Sucks here]
- Digital Fingerprint and AntiLeech
If, like me, you keep finding splogs with your content scraped into their posts and, like me, you’re not overly keen on seeing it, then you can use Digital Fingerprint or AntiLeech. The former puts a ‘fingerprint’ of your choosing into your posts which is only visible when reading it via RSS. (That’s why some of you might be seeing an additional little message at the bottom of posts in your RSS readers.) It then tracks the fingerprint and shows you when it’s been indexed in various search engines. AntiLeech confuses the scraping bot and garbles the content with a link back to your site and the plugin author’s. As I’m thinking on, I suppose one should negate the other, but Digital Fingerprint is worth it just to see how quickly various readers and engines pick up on your content.
[Digital Fingerprint plugin] [AntiLeech]
Oh, and the above are all Wordpress plugins.
UPDATE: Oh, the irony - there’s something broken and you can’t currently even leave your url. Now that’s a way to stop spammers. Fixed!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ultimate List of Dofollow plugins.
Hi Paul, good for you for “doing” the right thing.
I think I will follow your lead and have the no-follow tags removed from my comments, too.
If you leave a comment on my blog, you ought to get all the rights and privileges of a real link, I feel.
Anita
Ah, but you hid the URL box the first time!
It took me a moment to figure out it was there. Can’t get a “dofollow” link unless you leave the URL, right?
Anita
And it appears tobe working as I don’t see any no=follow nonsense in the page source.
You’re the second person to bring up the ‘leave url’ thing. Yesterday it wouldn’t even drop down, so quite a bit of detective work followed and there was some javascript weirdness going on so I just got rid of a plugin.
I’m still seeing no=follow in the body of the comments themselves, but such is life.
It bugs me a bit how comment spam and the methods we’ve employed to combat it have stopped us conversing properly through our blogs.
Of course people should be ‘rewarded’ for leaving a comment. I’m also having trackback and pingback troubles which I don’t have if I turn off Akismet.
It be a right royal pain, y’know.
We’ve had it remved for quite a while now with no ill effects and certainly no increase in spam