But when I see the tech media oohing about a 3rd Party captcha service that uses ads, I feel I can add something to the discussion.

4 or 5 years ago one of the best though slighly naughty Adsense tricks was to slap a adsense advert right next to the submit button of any forum form. People make mistakes and occasionally click by accident, or at least the ads get seen.
Worst case scenario was you at least got an advert impression.

Microsoft have a patent application for using advertising as part of a captcha from February 2008, as pointed out by Tim when that application was made public a year ago, and he felt he was being squeezed out of the advert captcha market.

Tim’s solution is slightly younger than Microsoft’s patent, launched commercially in December 2008 to existing customers.

However the concept of tying a brand to a captcha goes back at least 5 years to this post.

Your Captcha Adverts In Action

This is what the output from the Captcha Adverts WordPress plugin looks like.

This is what the Microsoft patent shows

This is what the Solve Media captchas look like.

I would hope the Solve Media (pending) patents are related to turning a captcha advert into an advertising network, and not based on a 5 year old concept that isn’t theirs.

Captcha As Part Of Sales Funnel

In practice for many sites captcha adverts are a terrible idea unless they are part of the site’s own sales funnel.

• You don’t or shouldn’t show a captcha to members – you have their email address confirmed
• Many sites are moving over to using a shared comment management system despite the synchronization issues and potential privacy issues. Again a vastly reduced need to use a captcha.
• The primary reason to use a captcha these days is at the time of account signup.
• If your site doesn’t gain tons of comments, a payment based upon completed captcha’s is fairly pointless.

A far better scenario is to use a captcha that is either part of the lead acquisition funnel, or to increase awareness for an advertising message that is shown immediately after the captcha is completed such as a one-time offer.

I am sure there is a value to the advertiser – the problem is for most publishers they should be integrating their own messaging, not 3rd party advertising.

Media Memo state

Playing along so far: Advertisers including Microsoft (MSFT), GE’s (GE) Universal Pictures and Toyota (TM), and publishers including Meredith (MDP), Tribune and AOL (AOL).
AOL is also an investor in the company (previously named AdCopy), via its AOL Ventures arm. Other investors, who have collectively put something like $6 million into the company, include First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures and angels like Chris Dixon, Roger Ehrenberg, Aydin Senkut and Shervin Pishevar.

Captchas for users who are not logged in for most media publications should be to enhance lead acquisition.

But how about for logged in users?

Captcha For Logged In Users

Completing a captcha is a one time event that is currently looked on as a barrier, when it could be turned into a reward for interaction.

Imagine members (maybe even non-members) could give answers to questions related to the content or other recent events for a prize, but they could only enter by commenting. Blogs run giveaway competitions all the time which reward entry points for placing a comment, though it isn’t really as scaleable as it could be, and the presentation needs to be refined.

For non-members such a competition could be the first step in a subscription funnel.

More on Techmeme but most of it seems like reworked press releases plus a video using Vimeo (who are not for commercial use)

I now feel that 95% of bloggers should switch to using Disqus, though I have some reservations.

These are some of the reasons why:-

• Matt Cutts today confirmed that nofollow links can reduce the amount of PageRank that flow to internal pages. The easiest current solution to solve this problem is to use Javascript for comments.
  It is an external javascript file, which Google can’t really handle currently, and even if they did, the chances are it might only count as a single link to your disqus discussion.
  Blogstorm has gone into the problems facing comment links in more detail, something I highlighted when Matt first mentioned this clarification at SMX.
• Matt Cutts in the same post highlighted again who you link to matters, and I think Google is going to place more and more emphasis on this. It is a lot of work for the average blogger to keep control of user generated content, and even the best comments sometimes come with spammy links. I have always maintained that “dofollow” isn’t for everyone because of the time commitment.
• Disqus is universal – it can be installed on every major blogging platform – many SEO solutions won’t be universal or easy to implement
• Can Spam & Email Deliverability – this is 50/50 – I have highlighted in the past that emails being sent from your own domain can be a significant liability
  

  It is your choice based on your own research and the legal advice you have received whether you think emails being sent from your domain which are not totally under your control could represent a problem.
  I honestly don’t know if Safe Harbour rules might apply to email delivery. I don’t know of any blog owner who has had problems either from a legal perspective, or with their hosting or domain registrars, but then I personally only know a few people who have been killed in car accidents – I know a lot more people who drive cars than publish business blogs.

• Invalidated Cache – this is a major consideration for high traffic blogs, and potentially product launches. The javascript doesn’t change on each new page load, thus your cached content also doesn’t change (if you just use their javascript on your page) – this can represent a major reduction in server load, even if you are using some kind of Op Cache (eaccelerator APC Xcache), RAM based page cache (Memcached) or more advanced techniques using page chunking. Forget conventional WP Cache / Supercache for product launches, it just can’t cope on its own.
• Social Media Viral Effect – the social media viral effect of using Discus is significant. Not many people are exposed to services such as backtype, but tons of people use Facebook – implementation of Facebook, Twitter and other logins for commenting whilst possible with WordPress isn’t trivial, and that is more plugins to deal with, more server load etc.
• Get to visit Disqus more often – I sometimes leave comments on other blogs that are using Disqus, and sometimes the comment notifications don’t get to me (deliverability issues) – I just noticed on my Andy Beard Disqus profile that Scott Rafer responded to something important 2 months ago, and I didn’t see it.

Negative Side of Disqus

• The SEO of the site needs some major work – it is almost insulting that the link to Twitter on my Disqus profile is followed, yet the link to my blog isn’t. The anchor text from a conversation on Disqus back to a blog isn’t exactly ideal. This is how Google sees my Discus Profile
• Google is very bad at indexing content on Disqus – this is partially due to the Disqus SEO problems – certainly a conversation I took part in 4 days ago isn’t indexed.
• I have heard reports that managing spam can be an issue, though I haven’t tested it, I rarely see spam on highly popular blogs
• It isn’t suitable for private content – you would have to use alternative commenting on private posts if you are running your blog as a membership site. That is something that can be worked around.
• It is hard, maybe impossible to market to people after they have left a comment. With standard WordPress comments, after someone has left an email, you could present a page offering site membership, a one time offer, or an affiliate product – even suggest related content of interest.
• If you have lots of niche blogs, you will hardly want to include all of them on a single Disqus profile if you want to stay under the radar of your competitors. How would a blog network cope? Retain ownership? I can’t see B5 Network with a profile of 300+ blogs in Disqus and managing who can moderate comments.

The SEO problems with Disqus are fixable, and in the current Google climate could offer significant advantages – plus Disqus could conservatively gain at least 400% traffic even without new adoption.
It is possible even if they also gave much more SEO friendly links throughout the whole site.

I am recommending Disqus above competitors JSKit and Intense Debate because both of these services the email subscriptions don’t stack in Gmail – a nightmare if you subscribe to comments on a popular blog, plus I believe there is more chance of Disqus fixing problems for a win/win solution.

Who knows, we might even get Twitter to remove nofollows too… eventually

Disclosure:- I am recommending Disqus even though part of my startup plans would have involved an SEO, product launch and membership friendly system with refined marketing funnel. If I ever get it off the ground, there are ways to migrate back from Disqus.

We definitely do not tolerate any kind of SPAM at all

Unfortunately the evidence available to me at the time not just on my own blog but elsewhere, was in stark contrast.

Washington Post Spammed – great way to encourage press coverage

Any legitimate service, if they wanted to get press coverage from an international news publication, might issue a press release, and contact a newspaper through legitimate channels directly, or maybe through their public relations company.

Wide Circles seem to have a different approach that might gain them coverage, but for totally different reasons…

First of all we need to look at the Washington Post Discussion Guidelines

3. You understand and agree that the discussion forums are to be used only for non-commercial purposes. You may not solicit funds, promote commercial entities or otherwise engage in commercial activity in our discussion forums.

The first spam is on an article about parental filtering by OpenDNS

The second is on an April Fools Day security warning

Wide Circles Spamming Wikia

I am sure Jimmy Wales will love this example of “Viral Marketing” – for obvious reasons I don’t quite trust the content, so I am nofollowing the link, and didn’t give it any suitable anchor text.

More Wide Circles Spam Examples

Note: I am nofollowing links where they might not get cleared up.

Chris Dockery seems to have been spammed in just the same way I was.

Scott seems to have been spammed by Wide Circles, but he really should nofollow the link to them, both on his blog, and on the sites that syndicate his content, such as Gooruze.

Gobala seems to have had his forums spammed by Wide Circles.

The Blog Herald seems to be a very soft target for comment spam these days, just look at this post as an example.
But amongst the junk, is a very familiar comment
Just curious if anyone ever heard of WideCircles internet viral marketing service ? I was referred to it by another webmaster. Apparently they work by injecting viral messages into various forums, blogs, wiki’s, classifieds and so on. These messages then contain backlinks which help with SEO, as well attract lot of referral traffic. They bill around 0.40c per each post that’s been active for 5 days and say a single post can easily attract 100 or more hits a day, I am going to give them a try today and see how it goes. http://wide circles.com?imt=2

The BizInformer – spammed

Another example of Wide Circles forum spam over on Angelfire.

FastCompany isn’t immune to this kind of junk, though it is in the form of junk blog posts – again the wonderful claims

Here is an interesting comment on Andrew’s blog post, on companies looking to increase email marketing spend.

its ok.. but i have a different opinion as most of the people now days dont even try to open the mails that comes from unknown senders because simply it might be a spam so i guess the majority that opens such mails are the new users of the internet and i agree that they are growing but they are not the majority of the internet users.

——–
franko.

Put The Message Where It Matters! WideCircles aka Wide Circles represents relevant, distributed, highly targeted and efficient internet word of mouth marketing using entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion using social network mediums such as blogs, forums, wikis and so on.
http://wide circles.com

My personal interpretation: The comment intent is to drop the link, and possibly to suggest that their “viral marketing” is a better alternative. Just because there might be some relevance to the comment doesn’t make this legitimate as a form of marketing.
This is a borderline case, but I would have spammed it.

WebProWorld Spammed

This example is actually very sad

WebProNews like many forums allow you to use a sig which has followed links – all you have to do is take part in the conversation, and you can get a link back to whatever sites you like, though probably best to link back to sites you own.

We have a thread asking for an alternative video hosting service for use with WordPress

The first comment was totally off topic, just spamming a link

The second message is highly generic with the link in the sig – but the person doing it doesn’t even know how to format an HTML hyperlink correctly. As well as running male beauty contests, Jaan just happens to be a moderator at WebProWorld. I am sure he will be interested.

Wide Circles Spamming Sphinn

This last example is a little more personal, because it involves a blog post that is about me, and calls into question my initial evaluation of Wide Circles.

I would like to state for the record I have no objection to open dialogue, and even criticism, but I much prefer criticism from real people rather than sock puppets.

There is a thread on Sphinn that has appeared and as others have noted, it is a little on the dubious side… to say the least.

Despite the extremely dubious comments, I actually hope the Sphinn moderators leave this example of Wide Circles comment spam online, though they should probably prevent the sock puppet accounts from voting on any more stories. IP addresses might not be much value, as some people working with Wide Circles are known to use proxys.

Do you also see how they are down voting comments made by legitimate members of the Sphinn community?

A quick shout out to thank Jonathan and Bob – I am not sure who Sleuth1 is.

The is a little history behind Bob’s comment, I once wrote a highly negative review of one of his services. I didn’t know him at the time, and it wasn’t actually obvious that he was involved. It would have taken a little detective work, and I found out quite by chance many months later when doing some other research.
So having written negative things about him, he now includes me on his blogroll.

Bob Massa also offers SEO linkbuilding and content generation services. Even though I have corresponded with Bob a little now by email, if his guys were blatantly spamming in the same way as Wide Circles, I would probably write a similar post to this one.

The Sphinn Sock Puppets

Just for the record…

JustinLang1

Jacklassape

Nancyd91

Jdanston

The Sphinn Story Itself

First of all, Jackie Nerito is a pseudonym

It was in some way a response to my coverage of Widecircles, but they didn’t deem it worthy of a link, even if nofollowed, or even provide a reference that could be copy / pasted.

I am not going to link through to the post, because they could just flag me as spam in Akisment, and I wouldn’t link to them with a followed link anyway, as I have no trust in the content.

http://circle world.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/andy-beard-on-wide-circles-aka-widecircles/

I have added a space in the URL – I wouldn’t want the post being linked to automatically by splogs.

This is actually one of two highly questionable blogs on the topic of Wide Circles, here is the other one

http://widecircles world.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/wide-circles-releases-new-version-of-the-system/

There is a high chance that they are both on the same WP.com account.

The points raised in the post?

• I did mention other services, such as forum posting and wiki spam – I didn’t concentrate on them – based upon the comments I have seen, if they have moved into also providing a blog post service, I really would stay far far away from it, unless your target market wouldn’t know the difference between literate and illiterate English. That is based upon what I have seen. I spent a fair amount of time on the first post, and again on this one – I also left comments with opposing views, even though they were anonymous with fake email address, and left using a proxy
• “Comments when done properly and by trained staff are not dangerous, they can increase your rank, help you with seo and allow you receive lot of referral traffic” – just look at the junk examples that Wide Circles have excreted over the internet to promote their own brand
• Referral traffic – the only referral traffic woulld be from people wondering “Where the hell did this junk comment come from” – once the domain starts being trashed in spam filters, and being talked about in negative light, the comment spam just increases the damage already caused.
• Comment spam as paid links – it appears the writer doesn’t pay careful attention to the Google webmaster groups, for instance this thread on penalties for one site, and in particular this comment by John Mu
  

  Similar to how you have removed spammy links in your own forum, you
  may want to consider what you can do to help clean up similar links on
  other people’s sites. Blogs and newspaper sites such as
  http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com sometimes receive short
  comments such as “dont agree”, apparently only for a link back to a
  site. These comments often use keywords from that site instead of a
  user name, perhaps “tree bench” for a furniture site or “sexy shoes”
  for a footwear site. If this kind of behavior might have taken place
  for your site, you may want to work on rectifying it and include some
  information on it in your reconsideration request. Given your
  situation, the person considering your reconsideration request might
  be curious about links like that, so the more you can explain about
  that, that may help as well.

  John

  Thus Google can look on spam comments as a factor for ranking penalties.

• Legitimate Paid Comments – I get the instinct impression that the author was working from a print out of my previous Wide Circles post, because the paragraph regarding legitimate paid comments contained a clear, obvious link to a previous blog post on paid blog comments. I have just included a link to it again.
  This would include for instance Tamar, who is paid to write articles for Mashable, Lifehacker and is the Associate Editor of Search Engine Round Table. If I link to an article she wrote on Mashable, and she came to my blog and left a comment, in many ways she is being paid to write that comment.
  If you were using an outsourcing company such as Bob’s to create your blog content, then in theory it would be legitimate for the person writing content for your blog to also respond to comments, but as themselves or their personal pseudonym, not as “you”.

As for being a “SEO expert” I let other people judge – I don’t sell any kind of consulting or work for any 3rd party clients.

I have a screenshot of the post itself for my records, but this page is already quite heavy with graphics, so in the interests of page load time, here is that broken URL again
http://circle world.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/andy-beard-on-wide-circles-aka-widecircles/

In many ways he is right:-

• You get increased automated comment spam
• You get increased spam from outsourced commenting
• You get increased spam from people using commenting efficiency tools (Comment Kahuna, Comment Hut etc)
• You get increased spam from people using dofollow search engines
• You get increased spam from people using lists of dofollow blogs
• You get Internet Marketing Gurus encouraging their interns to comment on their behalf

It takes additional time to manage comments on your blog even when you set up Spam Karma effectively, but that is something you could outsource to compensate, or have managed by a more junior member of staff.

You also leak a little bit of extra juice, how much depends on your site structure, and how many comments you get. Some people prefer to have huge blogrolls of the people who buy them drinks at seminars.

What Do You Gain?

I think the biggest gain is in community

• I don’t have to write all the content myself, my readers contribute and gain a small reward
• What happens when you engage a community of linkerati? They link to you more often
• If you gain more links, you are just sharing part of a bigger pie
• The tools are keyword based – people with websites covering a specific topic visit your site – maybe initially to just drop links, but it is amazing how many can be converted to regular visitors who leave constructive comments, and link to you from their own sites.

Google doesn’t give penalties just because you decide to let those providing user generated content have a little link love.

I should know, my blog due to paid reviews has been on Google’s radar for a long time – I was one of the first to be hit with a PageRank penalty back in October 2007, and as soon as I blocked those review pages with robots.txt, my Google pagerank penalty was at least partially lifted, and I think in a more recent update they lifted it totally.

It does take a little effort, but if you haven’t got time to

• Read the comments left by your visitors
• Check out their sites
• Give them feedback
• Communicate

Why the hell have you got a blog in the first place?

I would be much more worried about comments on your blog which have been left with commercial intent with the upcoming changes to the consumer protection act on 26th May

Update

Whilst this isn’t in any way conclusive proof, it is just a little fun to add this

I have topical authority on my side to compensate for the fact I linked to Dave who posted first, though Google probably can’t factor those into its ranking that quickly.

Thus this result might just be domain authority… it doesn’t look like I have some kind of authority problem, despite having 1000s of dofollow links from comments.

Update

Dave has inched ahead of me in the SERPs – I think the link Jane gave him from SEOmoz swayed the standing fairly heavily.

The best way to guest post on my blog is just to write a great comment.

Wide Circles ( http://www.widecircles.com/ nofollowed link for good reason) have a number of offerings.

• Forum sigs – this for me is a grey area, I know many forums that allow affiliate links in sigs, and there is a market for forum sig links on some of the large webmaster forums, though they don’t offer much traffic or juice benefit. I suppose they are good for sites that can’t get better links.
• Comment spam – this takes the form of a social signature (again a nofollow link), leaving a link underneath a name when leaving a comment. They do stress that commenters
  should check the rules for each site before spamming them.
• Wiki spam – they add links to pages or create new pages – some SEOs are going to thing “great – cool service”

They also list general comments, guestbooks, polls and classified ads

You will find blogs that will allow a link to be left under a name, especially when a link field is not provided. The problem is that these fields are specifically intended to link back to a person’s own site and where they are not present a link drop as part of a sig though accepted, would still be expected to link to something related to the person leaving the comment.

This helps other readers find out who they are, what might influence their perspective, and might even be looked on as a method of indirect disclosure, as long as there is an easy to find disclosure statement for anyone clicking through.

Evidence For The Prosecution

Exhibit A

This comment was posted on a post about Blogrush

wide circles or widecircles is really great service http://www.wide circles.ca

Exhibit B

To add insult to injury, this was posted on my post slamming the practice of comment spam as part of internet marketing mentoring programs

wide circles or widecircles is really a great service indeed http://www.wide circles.com

Note: I added a space in the urls above to ensure even on splogs they get no link credit

Both comments came from the same person using the following IP
(IP: 68.145.66.81 , S0106001839263935.cg.shawcable.net)

Maybe I should contact Shaw Communications Inc. about abuse, though I am not sure ISPs look on comment spam as seriously as email spam. It did get sent to my email address however, and if I was using subscribe to comments, it might have gone to 50+ email subscribers.

The legal issues around blog comment spam can start getting nasty.

They also make fun claims such as

This single signature with the link can attract many users who are intrested to find out about the service or product being offered and it will also help with search engine optimization strategy and rankings, since every comment made by our publisher is esentially different.

…complete with their spelling errors.

Anyone using the comment spam service is lining themselves up for a reputation management disaster, because just like I am making this blog post about Wide Circles, other people don’t like being spammed either.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I headed off a rather delicate situation with the mentoring programs comment spam. Shawn, one of my regular readers and a SEO in Scotland was getting sick of comment spam coming from these so called “internships” and was quite prepared to go on the warpath..

I advised caution, because other than the mentorship programs, the people involved are actually quite legitimate marketers, and contacted a mutual friend to see if things could be handled more diplomatically. The jury is out on that still.

Another thing to be cautious about, these are paid links, even the forum links, and Google are always on the lookout for link buying, especially on obvious web destinations such as popular webmaster forums.

This isn’t the only incident today. I had another one where I caught a SEO linkbuilding for a client – I just contacted his boss – link building through comments is extremely risky both for the client and service provider.

It is especially risky on SEO blogs, and many dofollow bloggers are very well aware of all the tricks – they know their regular readers.

I have argued in the past that paid blog comments can be legitimate, but it is under very specific circumstances, that Wide Circles just does not meet.

This is a list of warning signs, which generally I spend just a few seconds on, though looking at a new commenter’s blog or website is something I try to do even if they leave a great comment.

• Short comments
• Off topic comments
• Comments that don’t add something very specific to the conversation
• Anchor text
• New Commenter
• Comment on very old post
• Difficult to determine referrer
• Link points to poor quality site
• Link points to site which doesn’t contain very specific personal information about the commenter
• Linking to something other than a blog (minor, just an alarm bell)
• Free email address (minor)
• Multiple comments in a row
• Deep linking (I like leaving deep links myself, but it is a warning)
• .ru .cn and a few other less common domain extensions – I have linked to Chinese and Russian sites, it is nothing personal – in fact I even once linked to a Chinese site scraping me because they did it so well with each paragraph being translated and the English equivalent as alt text.
• Linking to what is obviously someone elses site (an SEO link building for a client)
• Referral from a dofollow list
• Referral from a dofollow search engine
• Referral with something related to dofollow in the search terms
• Other complicated search expressions

I am a harsh moderator, I only have 2 options in the emails sent to me by Spam Karma

Approve
Mark as Spam

No delete option, so people who spam my comments rarely trouble me again, as the penalties snowball.

In the past I have also flagged otherwise great comments just because they linked to a junk site

You should never look on dofollow comment links as the sole reason to leave a comment, it should just be a bonus of taking a real part in the conversation making a real contribution to the community.

Here is a general rule of thumb – if I delete your comment, would it be missed?

There are regular members of the community here that if they write a comment such as “great post”, it will remain, because it is genuine feedback – a good indication of reaching that status is when you comments never get held for moderation.

I think I am going to add lots of this as an extension to my comments policy, feel free to add any points to your own.