How do you determine SPAM from HAM?

I’m wondering where I should draw the line on comments.

I get some comments that are short, yet they say good things about the site, but they include a link to a site that is non-related.

What should I do; Edit the comment to remove the link, and leave the praise in, or delete the entire thing as SPAM?

Go take a look at Yahoo’s financial reports and see how much they spend on PR.

I think that if G really wants to level the playing field they should stop selling PR, and make everyone play by the same rules.

Unfortunately though, I fear that the opposite may be coming down the bandwidth sometime in the future.

I think you should post a message on your blog where to mention that spaminf isn’t alowed and that the comments are accepted only without any link or maybe with links for other related blogs, non commercial ones.
And who doesn’t respect that won’t have the comment posted. In this way you’ll be able to see also who really wants to comment and who to spam.

I agree with Hooperman, you made a content void statement, then tried to add content after the fact.

Did you know that you get negative points for spamming?

Yeah it’s true, googlebot not only judges the sites it’s crawling, but it also checks crawls the links it finds on those sites, if you’re dropping links indiscriminately (i.e. your site’s content is non-related to the sites you drop links on) you’re shooting yourself in the foot as far as google is concerned. :eye:

Dropping a link and not leaving a relative comment is an utter waste of your time and a waste of time for the webmasters of the sites you’re spamming, because they’re going to delete your link.

If you were paying attention to how everyone else is replying to this thread you would see a definite trend towards deleting anything that so much as mildly resembles spam.

If you see the first comment then the second one. I put the words “so-so” in there to show you kind of as an example. I didn’t really have a comment I could think of it’s hard to write a comment on something without reading an article.

Well, I was talking about editing only the good comments, and I don’t get too many of those. The majority is blatant spam and that gets zapped.

Considering the current signal:noise ratio on my blog, it would look like self spamming.

I don’t know how G looks at just a few here and there, but guessing I’d say a few here and there wouldn’t make much difference either way, so it’s probably a wasted effort.

That’s what I’m thinking. A relative comment that shows a genuine interest in the subject matter of the post is good.

A relative comment that shows genuine interest in the subject matter combined with a link to a related site with equally good content is excellent.

At this point those are the exception not the norm, as most comments are links only, no actual comment at all, with a few now and then that use the generic comment as mentioned earlier in this thread.

Many of the link droppers show up every time I update the blog, so I’m thinking there is a connection between the link farmers and pinging. Maybe those 140 ping sites weren’t such a good idea after all. :rolleyes:

Me thinks it time to edit some of those out. :cool:

sorry, yes, i did

a totally unrelated link is a sign that it is an “seo expert” and these people do not deserve to get your backlink

In cases like that I edit the comment and change the commenter’s link to point back to my site before approving the comment. Is that bad?

The bit I bolded was missing from your original example and makes all the difference :slight_smile:

Now the commenter is discussing what you wrote, not how you wrote it.

I drop links any place that allows me to, but I don’t mention my link in my post. If it says it’s fine to do I do that and leave it at that. I don’t sell anything though I’m more of a informative blogger rather than a marketer of any kind, so it doesn’t matter if they accept it or not.

If it’s a good comment like “hey, nice article I really enjoyed so-so and you gave a good explanation”. That’s when I let them post a link. I don’t do it with the guys who post anything non relavent. I got hit with 300 blog comments in one day. This was weird though I probably should ask someone. They hit some form of a spam filter, but I still got a ton of emails because the filter is free. That’s not the point though NONE of the comments has any writing. They were www.feijafej;jafifjeajf;ewjiaf;ej.com followed by oeajfo;iejafjeo;iajfoie;jaojfie. The sites were all random like that and none of them I doubt would be real, so I know what you mean.

The ones in between like “hey nice article” or “cool site” I ignore.

Honestly if you were to read a blog and then the comments and all of them said cool site or something wouldn’t you think something was up? No one really leaves a comment of “cool site” and means it most of the time.

Well it does add if you take out So-so and put in a real thing.

Hey, nice article I really enjoy (so-so) your theory on the logistics of the grid system. The system is definitely something that needs to be redesigned in my city. It’s just not working and everything is currently over run right now. I really think you did great with explaining a new idea.

Unfortunately, a summary of how well you wrote adds nothing to the discussion. I delete all comments like that. If commentors are prepared to discuss the meat of the post, their comment might stay.

But then I suppose how you treat comments like that depends on what kind of blog you want. If you just want to chat with people, or make your blog appear popular, then letting fluff comments stay might work.

I guess you could see it as two sides, but I intent on meaning it would be a good comment. Comments don’t have to be perfect. Even if you live a “nice article I really enjoyed it” and didn’t leave anything else Google doesn’t see that as spam. If that was considered spam Google would punish most sites. I mean Yahoo and those huge sites have advertising comments that get through and they are just fine in traffic and rankings.

Let me add this though. If you were doing that 100s of times I’d see that. I guess I don’t really leave too many comments as I see it a minimum return investment. Link building alone would get me no where and fast. Most of the seo items are worthless just to focus on like link building or PR. It’s better if you self promote and build that way, so you can have other people doing this for you. Post your items on forums or share them with other people. If your creative enough seo doesn’t matter that much. Seo is just a small factor of it all. I guess if you were a business though it would be different as seo might be a better option, but I’m more into the viral market for health and fitness.

My rules are:

Comments with sense to the article and links that are related are published.

Comments without sense, with or without links are put to thrash.

No. That is brilliant.

^ excellent point. While striving to “get the news out” in the hopes of reaching more interested visitors, the effort is also reaching more interested SPAMmers.

I wonder if there’s a way to evaluate ping sites? AFAIK they don’t (can’t) restrict their users to non-SPAMmers. Yet it seems there must be a way to rough-guesstimate the resulting signal to noise ratio.

It’s amazing how many I get that play on ego. Rarely on-topic and more “meaty”, but usually something fluffy like:

“Nice site. Interesting article. I’ll be here often and tell all my friends”
Posted by Cheap Viagra (http://medsareus.info)

just to get a link in the “comment author”.

I just now got through permanently deleting one(for the 7th or 8th time) that reads “Great site! Lots of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends.”

I don’t recall what the link was to.

Lol, it kind of reminds me of my neighbor who parked his tractor in my yard…