There is a negative side to having your PageRank restored, or maybe depending on your niche it can be turned into a positive.
Many of the blog comment tools are based not just on the highest ranking pages for a search term, but resorting pages based on PageRank.
Whilst my content ranks well, when such lists were sorted by PageRank of the pages, or of the domain, having a -2 or -3 penalty was greatly reducing the amount of manual comment spam I was receiving compared to how much it could have been.
For the last few months I have had between 1000 and 2000 visitors per month who I am fairly sure were here primarily to link drop.
How do you monetize comment spammers?
Well possibly sell them some tools to do it more efficiently, if you can identify them by referrer ID.
Hey Comment Spammer, You Need Better Spam Tools
Then you provide them with a bunch of free and paid alternatives that all have some kind of revenue attached.
Shephan listed a few comment tools recently and many of them have an affiliate program.
11 Comments
And this week I have to be on the lookout a lot for spammers because of the top commenter plugin. Batches of comments from the same people all right after the first of the month. The time it’s numbers reset. I have seen a lot of what I would consider bigger bloggers doing this also. I am considering taking it off, but for now have it on just my index. You would think doing this was a lot of work for a link that will only last a month.
The top commenter plugin has actually been highlighted in an ebook soon to be released, and probably sold to 10,000+ people.
It is certain to get worse soon
Dropped from a PR5 to a PR4 this last go ’round, which makes more sense to me compared to other sites around (much as it hurts to admit it.)
Funny that comment spam volume dropped within a day or so. Guess there is a little silver lining to loosing a little favor with the Google gods.
Hah – you just blew my mind. Of course the natural reaction to spammy comments/activities is irritation – but to turn it around and use what you can see to be a targeted demographic as a revenue stream? Brilliant.
Clearly I need to elevate my game.
This is pretty funny. Rude, in the face and yet they will follow the link.
Maybe addressing them as comment marketers might increase the click thru.
I just wish google would make up their mind and stop plpaying with their algarithims. it seems one day they want us to do one thing and the next day another. very frustrating that we need to chop and change to meet their requirements. As for spamming, the only way to monetize them is impression based advertising, at least its worth a few bucks
Vey good point. Moderating the comments can become a full-time job.
In other words you can become a victim of your success…
I am afraid I am not sure there is a solution to that problem.
What I do is as follows: I outsource the job to India and I pay $1.20 per hour for this job.
About the Top Commenter plugin, I set it to count comments over the last 30 days so it doesn’t renew the first of every month. Comments fall off after 30 days, creating a rolling effect. Not sure if you can do that with the widget version, but in the regular version you set the “reset” option to 30 (through the plugin editor).
Agreeing with Mark Rae above – outsourcing for the moderation may be in a person’s best interest – leave it to India! (For this task anyway) Where is the line drawn for link dropping and genuine responses?
This reminds me of the go around on Nigerian Scammers. Sell them something…how brilliant!
hi,
nice post.
thanks a lot for sharing the information.