Most disturbing of all though are the SEO consultants and agencies who I have caught commenting on behalf of their clients, or as themselves with a link through to a client’s site. Some of them are totally dumb about it.

I now have a new comments policy in force though most of it is just a clearer interpretation of what has been in place for the last 3+ years.

Comment Policy Update: Nov 13th 2009 Keywords Etc

Looks like Friday 13th is a very bad day for comment spammers…

• No more keywords within anchor text in the comment fields
• No sig links under comments
• Highly relevant links in the body of a comment can contain anchor text such as the blog title but they will be judged on a case by case basis.
• Even after these changes, I still expect to delete 90% of human comments as the vast majority are just an attempt to get a link rather than adding real value to the conversation.
• SEO Consultants/Agencies – If I catch you commenting but linking to a client’s site, your online reputation, your firm’s and that of your client are being put at severe risk.

My full comment policy

I should really do an update about Disqus, but we can save that for another day – I still haven’t found enough time to fully clean up the mess they left my comments in, and some things will never be recovered.

This is part of my cleanup for when the new FTC rules come into effect at the beginning of December, though effectively the new US rules aren’t any stricter than rules currently in Europe & UK.

Related posts

• Guru Internet Marketing Mentorship Programs Abusing Dofollow Blogs (36)
• WordPress Comment SEO Solutions (94)
• WideCircles – Takes Spam Seriously? LMAO (9)
• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• Ugly In Pink? (1)
• The Ultimate Way To Show Reader Appreciation (22)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins (61)

WordPress Comment Solutions

Shaun almost a month ago released a modified version of Lucia’s Linky Love that removes links from comments rather than nofollow them as a partial solution to Google’s changes to PageRank distribution in regards nofollow.

Dave Naylor is also doing something similar

I also now need to take you back to a comment I left over on SEOmoz

Vladomir Prelovac has come up with what I would regard as a partial solution to this problem

I am glad someone has done this as I have been dropping hints about taking this approach for the last year in various places, back to the old Webbbs days, though it needs taking a few steps further to be truly effective.

There are however some big monster bugbears that need to be considered with this approach, just like with tag pages.
The benefits you will see on his site, with a huge amount of PageRank to play with from the release of WordPress Themes are potentially significant, whereas with a smaller site it can lead to complications, and you might for instance want to noindex the newly created comment pages ;) Vladomir doesn’t use tag pages extensively, more selectively.

For the last six months or so, my understanding of how Google ranks pages has changed significantly, in part due to studying the way Google handles huge sites such as Blogcatalog & Technorati, but it would be wrong for me to publish details without clearance from Tony at Blogcatalog because I had access to their analytics.

Whilst a lot of it would be speculative… almost like a fairy story, for some it might be more akin to a lightening strike than a light bulb moment.

Imagine you have a choice between having a tag page or a comment page in Google’s index

• A tag page you can specify the exact title tag
• A page created with SEO Super Comments you can’t, in many ways the comment is about as optimized as a Tweet on twitter.

Twitter’s upstream based on Alexa is only 10% Google.com, so maybe 20% overall – a large proportion would be navigational queries & Twitter account holder names.I am not 100% confident about Alexa upstream numbers, but they might be more accurate for Twitter than many sites.

You would get an occasional tweet ranking for very long tail terms, but it is not significant.

So if you are creating new pages for comments, you would want them in the index only under specific circumstances.

• Existing flat site architecture with all original content in primary index
• Your categories are indexed and viable landing pages
• You have your tag pages sufficiently indexed which may require various techniques to make the content more unique and useful.
• Have ways to use comment data on tag pages
• Have ways to create tag pages based purely on comments and 3rd party content ;)
• The permalink for a comment from comment feeds points to the new pages, not to an anchor/fragment/”#name” – this has been something that needed fixing anyway, because permalinks on WordPress posts with lots of comments are currently broken, because comments can move from page1 to page2 – there are lots of ways to then use this RSS feed pointing to unique URLs on your site ;)
• Rewrite rules for comment URLs
• Link to a comment should use anchor text based on the title
• Link from a name should provide all comments from that user on a single page
• Extensive use of Ajax – this gets a bit complicated, and it would be experimental, but why have the whole comment on the post permalink at all? At least from a spider perspective. A representation of the comments can be pulled in as pre-cached page fragments. Comments could also be pulled into member profiles if a person commenting is also in some way a site member, and maybe in that situation an individual commenter page should be totally replaced by a member page.
• Integration with social media – if you are pulling in tweets, friendfeed etc, give those a page as well, and then allow people to even comment on those directly from your blog, and push the data back out to whichever service.
• Pull more data from trackbacks/pingbacks – grab an excerpt and host it on your site on a unique page. If someone comments on it from your site, send a pingback

The Future Of Commenting And Aggregation

An even more radical approach would be to totally get rid of “comments” as a unique entity, and many other social sites for that matter, and have only unique personal streams of media, long or short form, video, pictures, text or a mixture, and what appears on other sites, whether on a blog as a comment, or on Twitter, Youtube or an social site would just be a syndicated copy of your original content. Just one permalink for the original content, with full ownership and privacy controls over who could see it.

In many ways Youtube is just a video feed reader where you syndicate your unique video, and you should link back to the original source, and get the original source ranking :)

What I am suggesting is a somewhat reverse approach to “Echo” recently launched in private beta or the Friendfeed aggregation.

A single source that you push out to other sites, rather than a multitude of aggregators. More like Tumblr or Posterous, but with much more control.

As a marketer however, it makes it difficult to reward comment participation without some kind of additional registration process.

The Complexities Of Syndicated Comments & Social Mentions

What really turns your mind upside-down is when you have a situation where you have a private blog post in a members area, and someone leaves a comment which is specific to the private content.

The commenter needs to maintain access controls, but at the same time the owner of the site with private content needs control as well, which can possibly be overridden. Who gets priority and ultimate control?

Who would have moderation rights? If moderated, would it be only the syndicated copy on a publishers site, or the canonical version maintained by the commenter.

Do you really want to mention in an “echo” on your blog that you cross-posted the same content to 100 social media sites?

Disqus?

I recently highlighted Disqus as a solution, it still is, but my reservations are increasing after using the service for a month – whilst the WordPress integration is clearly stated as being beta, I am going to call it a very raw beta – there are tons of problems with synchronization and comment moderation leaves a lot to be desired. My last support ticket to them was 6 days ago, with a second full comment export to try to get sync sorted out remains unanswered.

I have informed them already that I am pulling the plug – the synchronization attempts are hopefully to fix problems that might prevent others having problems in the future.

There are other issues that I don’t feel should be aired here on the blog. I am giving them some time to hopefully get them fixed.

Other WordPress Plugins?

A big shout out to 4 other plugins I have been using recently

Autooptimize – so far it is the best CSS / Javascript optimization plugin I have used (and I have used quite a few) and the author has been highly responsive with fixes to various plugins and widgets. It sets expires and gzip correctly too.

What I have also done is hacked things so Disqus uses local CSS and images, that I will eventually be able to migrate to a CDN, though the Disqus CSS brings up all kinds of horrible warnings in Yslow and Page Speed Firefox Plugins.

Wp Supercache Plus – I am currently using it with Eaccelerator – I am using the “bleeding edge” version from SVN, and am in the process of implementing fragments with thematic – I had a few problems using it with memcached WP Supercache combined with Memcached object-cache.php.
Fragment caching with comments especially will reduce server load each time a new comment is added to a blog under heavy load, such as a product launch.

Probably also long overdue is a mention of Tim’s WordPress Membership Plugin. On the surface most plugin offerings look the same, it is only when you look at the code and how they have overcome hurdles that some solutions shine – I was involved a little with the early stages over a year ago and many features have since been copied, and other offerings have leapfrogged Your Members in more obvious ways, but at its core I still believe Your Members to be the most flexible solution (oh and you can see the support in public). There are lots of useful hooks and ways you can extend the platform, relatively easily, though a little PHP knowledge goes a long way. It is also pretty secure.
The full reasons deserve a lot longer post, but other solutions get promoted extensively without extensive research into alternatives – I need to spend another $500 on alternative solutions before I can realistically write a comprehensive review.
With Your Members it is possible to control access level to comments as well as the posts themselves. If you have a private post, you also want to selectively keep the comments private.

FAQ-Tastic – Zain now has both a free light version (that is very flexible) and a pro version – it is a serious solution for anyone looking to leverage their audience to create new product or content offerings. I am frequently asked to add an “Ask Andy” section here on the blog, but I will most likely do it in a more private area.
Comments on custom areas of WordPress is something I don’t think 3rd party systems will ever handle effectively.

This post has been a little bit of a mixed bag, but hopefully you find something useful & worth sharing with others.

Related posts

• Disqus – Why 95% Of Bloggers Should Switch (106)
• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• Ugly In Pink? (1)
• The Ultimate Way To Show Reader Appreciation (22)
• Site Structure – SEOs Going Fishing Without Any Bait (22)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins (61)
• Mike Sansone Cracks The Secret Code to Removing Nofollow From Typepad (5)

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.

Related posts

• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• Is Akismet a Spam Magnet? Plus a little on Trackbacks (5)
• How To Remove Nofollow On Moveable Type (4)
• Guru Internet Marketing Mentorship Programs Abusing Dofollow Blogs (36)
• Exclusive: No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee Community (33)
• DoFollow | No Nofollow – Highs & Lows (42)
• Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals (44)
• Are You A Fake Dofollow Blogger? (49)

It runs something like this (though I haven’t signed up to one to get exact details)

• You sign up to the mentorship program
• One of the tasks is backlink building from Dofollow blogs
• The new internet marketer runs around leaving comments on Dofollow blogs, but uses backlinks to the blog or salespage of the internet marketing guru
• After dropping a certain number of backlinks, the new internet marketer qualifies for a bonus

The backlinks are sometimes the link reserved for the comment author, or sometimes product mentions within the comments.

I Regard This As Comment Spam

My normal reaction is to hit the spam button, which will eventually prevent me seeing future comments by the people on the mentorship program, even if they eventually start leaving comments on their own behalf.

I haven’t got time to edit links even if the comments contain some legitimate content.

The mentorship program is effectively burning legitimate link sources for the people taking the “course”.

Great job..

In addition, the chances of me giving an editorial link at some time to the “guru” or promoting one of their products as a JV partner are hugely reduced.

Legitimate Employees And VAs

As a blogger, I want to know who is leaving a comment.

I don’t mind anchor text used in comments, if my blog passes juice it might as well pass anchor text as well, but anyone following the link needs to be able to determine who left the comment.
This is a lot easier with personal blogs, or blogs run by a single person.

If my friend Michel Fortin left a comment with the anchor text “Copywriting” I am not going to worry about it. You go to his blog, it is clearly his blog.

Joy Gustilo works for Russell Brunson – that is a link to her profile on DotComSecrets and Joy often uses “Internet Marketing Joy” as anchor text – that is great, I know it is Joy and not Russell leaving the comment.

I have a few other readers also competing for that SERP so I should probably balance that out a little

If Courtney used “Internet Marketing” when leaving a comment, I wouldn’t have a problem – his blog is personal

You have probably seen Dwain Jeworski on various social networks. He used to work with Rich Schefren, and now is with the Internet Marketing Center as their Affiliate Manager. If Dwain used “Internet Marketing Dwain as anchor text in a comment, that would be appropriate. Just using Internet Marketing wouldn’t, because it would be impossible to tell if the comment was written by Dwain or maybe Derek Gehl.
The IMC have over 100 employees – can you imagine if a few of them all had a conversation in my comment area each signing their name as Internet Marketing?

One thing I would love to see on the IMC site is staff profiles which could be used as landing pages for social media link building. It would be possible to funnel juice from those landing pages through to pages where it is needed, which is much harder to do with links directly to a home page.

That is something Joy should think about with her comment links as well.

I am not quite sure how I would deal with comments from Jim Boykin if he was using anchor text such as “Internet Marketing” – I think anchor text would be appropriate for a link to his blog, as the blog is clearly his, whereas a link to the company site I would want some kind of identifier in the anchor text as to who left the comment.
Then again Jim’s ninja’s would probably use some kind of landing page method.

Of course Josh could link through to his Internet Marketing Blog as much as he likes. Again it is his personal blog. (some more on Josh’s blog coming up soon)

So ends my “SERPs Neutral” overview of acceptable linking practice, though there is a good chance I have missed a few people out from my readers.

I am Not Going To Name & Shame

At least not yet…

I left a comment on one blog regarding this practice, and it seemed to stop, at least on my blog, but the comment didn’t appear on the blog, and was not acknowledged directly.

Another “guru” when contacted about this last year offered to chat about it, but didn’t apologise.

I have noticed it starting again over the last few weeks, not just spammy linkbuilders, but quite obviously new internet marketers under some kind of mentorship.

Come on guys, behave… I’m serious

Related posts

• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• How To Remove Nofollow On Moveable Type (4)
• Friday 13th – A Very Bad Day for Comment Spammers (57)
• Exclusive: No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee Community (33)
• DoFollow | No Nofollow – Highs & Lows (42)
• Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals (44)
• Are You A Fake Dofollow Blogger? (49)

On Shoemoney, Pam takes a pop at the Ifollow Movement, the lists of links to dofollow blogs that traversed the Blogosphere 6 months ago.
Whilst I was included on some of those lists, I didn’t take an active roll, as the lists really didn’t present any value to me.

I suppose Akismet is great if you don’t care about the comments on your blog, or whether the good ones appear.

Comment moderation with Spam Karma can take time if you get a lot of comments but not much more than the time it takes to read them, and if you are using subscribe to comments, you are much less likely to be hit with a CAN SPAM complaint – I see some fairly nasty comment spam come through to my mailbox all the time from Akismet protected blogs.

I applaud Greg Boser’s efforts to create a hand picked selection of Dofollow blogs around a specific niche, though he will find many of the blogs in the Dofollow community on Bumpzee are high quality, but not all to do with online marketing (thank goodness)
There will be an OPML file available for the community very soon, I just need some time to do some testing and to give Scott some feedback.

Dofollow & Community Go Hand In Hand

If you want to be a successful blogger like Liz, note we are not talking about a successful affiliate who just happens to have a large fan base, but only earns 3% of income from blogging such as Shoemoney, then the comments you receive on your blog are as much, or even more important than the original article.

Lots depends on your business model as to whether creating a professional, positive business culture in your comment area is important to you.

As Kirk points out with some amazing comment stats Liz has been very successful in building up a community over 2 years. 50,000 real comments.

In a year I have only had just over 5000 comments, and many remark that I get a lot of comments.

Part of it Kirk attributes to subscribe to comments, it is important – I remarked a while ago to Darren at Problogger that one change he could make to his blog was to reintroduce subscribe to comments, as I would certainly participate more.

By doing so, I feel more a part of his community, I comment more frequently because I can follow the conversation that take place afterwards in response, and also link to Darren more.
It would be interesting to see if he can attribute an increase in return visitors due to subscribe to comments. Maybe there is a way with some hacking to measure that.

I would estimate that less than 2% of the comments I receive on a daily basis are people commenting purely for a search engine boost, and whilst I am a human so I can make a mistake, I would estimate that 90% of those comments don’t appear on the blog even if they sound vaguely on topic. Of the ones that do get on the blog, most have the link removed.

The same is true of deliberately self promotional comments of little value.

The best way to tell my readers you wrote about a subject, is to link to me with a trackback – I have seen up to 50 people leaving my site in the past following an early trackback with a good headline

I don’t mind good quality timely link drops. As an example Court mentioned the “real” PageRank update to me in a comment with a link to his post.

PageRank & Real Attribution

For me, attribution isn’t an after thought of a careless thanks or token gesture, I always try to give people links that will send as much traffic as possible, or be of most value to them (useful keywords).
I suppose you could look on it as the whitehat way of “selling links”

As an example, here is the link I thanked Courtney with:-

When people base their article around information obtained by others, the least they can do is try to send some traffic to the other party, otherwise the link isn’t much better than a paid link.

Sure it might fulfil legal obligations, and possibly let the search engines know the source of the content, but is that really sufficient?

Related posts

• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• How To Remove Nofollow On Moveable Type (4)
• Guru Internet Marketing Mentorship Programs Abusing Dofollow Blogs (36)
• Exclusive: No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee Community (33)
• DoFollow | No Nofollow – Highs & Lows (42)
• Do You Want a $200 Press Release Submission With PRWeb? For Free? (7)
• Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals (44)

Over the last few months I have rejected over 100 blogs to the No Nofollow / Dofollow community on Bumpzee, and all but about 20 were because they didn’t have nofollow removed correctly from their comments.

Fortunately about 30 of those subsequently either contacted me to have this explained to them, or fixed the problem and then notified me that things were resolved.

Lots of people for some reason don’t get back in touch with me.

Requirements To Join The No Nofollow Community On Bumpzee

These are the requirement on the submission form

This community is for family friendly sites that support the Do Follow, I Follow, No Nofollow movement.
Blogs can be on any subject, but please do not submit blogs with NSFW content.

Please ensure all blogs contain original content, and have comments visible that clearly demonstrate that nofollow has been removed.

Of the 20 sites rejected for quality reasons a few were splogs, one was effectively a single page sales letter, and a fair number were datafeed sites or didn’t have enough original content.

I have also had a couple where their comment system was totally broken

Rejection Message

When people are rejected, they receive the following message

Your blog cannot be included in the community.

Most sites are rejected because they haven’t implemented some form of dofollow correctly, and sites are checked before inclusion.
It is not possible to resubmit after changes have been made to fix a problem.
If you are rejected, fix the “no nofollow” requirement, and then send a personal message to the community administrator for inclusion.

Thank you for your submission.

Some people probably had removed nofollow, but then performed an upgrade to their blogging software and forgot to enable a plugin, or maybe changed theme and forgot to make corrections.

YADL (Yet Another Dofollow List)

There seems to be another Dofollow list making the rounds.

Out of curiosity I visited the blogs linking through, and every single one I checked was on blogspot, and didn’t have nofollow removed correctly.

How To See Nofollow Links At a Glance

If you are using Firefox as your browser, just install the search status plugin which shows nofollow links using CSS highlighted with a pink background.

Policing the Neighbourhood

I do visit blogs in the No Nofollow community, in fact I am sure like many members of the community I spend more time on dofollow blogs than any other.

I am actually trying to find the time to do an audit, to ensure that all members continue to comply although it would be appreciated if people performed a self-audit occasionally, because it is easy to forget to switch a plugin back on, or forget to modify a theme after a change.

This is something in your own interests, after all if you display a badge in your sidebar, and it is no longer true, you are deceiving your audience.

Related posts

• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• How To Remove Nofollow On Moveable Type (4)
• Exclusive: No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee Community (33)
• DoFollow | No Nofollow – Highs & Lows (42)
• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• Guru Internet Marketing Mentorship Programs Abusing Dofollow Blogs (36)
• Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals (44)
• WordPress Comment SEO Solutions (94)

Lucia has spent a lot of time not just programming, but profiling the traits of comment spam and I am sure that work will continue.

Take a look at Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin

Now added to the master list of Nofollow and Dofollow solutions

Related posts

• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• Ugly In Pink? (1)
• The Ultimate Way To Show Reader Appreciation (22)
• Wordpress Plugin: Snowfall (9)
• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Results: Top Wordpress Plugins (March 2007) (2)
• Results: Top Wordpress Plugins (April 2007) (10)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins (61)

There has been quite extensive coverage of the topic on Problogger, and this comment by Darren Rowse really went into the details about why the Buy Blog Comments service wouldn’t work.

At $19.99 for 100 posts you’re paying them 19 cents per comment. For someone living in the US or Canada to make a decent living at 19 cents per comment (he says they are US/Canadian citizens that make the comments) how many comments would they need to leave in a day? To make $100 they’d have to leave 526 comments….

An 8 hour day has 480 minutes in it. They’d need to be leaving comments at over 1 per minute. Now to make a comment genuine and add to the conversation they’d need to read the post before making the comment….. The site says they also hand pick blogs from relevant niches (more time)…. I guess then that Jon needs to take his cut before sharing it with the people who work for him…. I can’t see how it adds up. Those working on this scheme need some fast way of posting comments – I’d suspect that they’d need to do at least two comments per minute.

But that doesn’t mean that all such services are totally unethical, not by a longshot.

Employees

If you have a full time employee, knowledgeable about your business, there is a high possibility that you would allow them to write comments on blogs. Matt Cutts is “just” an employee of Google , but is trusted enough to leave the occasional comment on a blog. He even uses his own name these days rather than “Google Guy”.

Permanent VA

Lots of people have virtual assistants, who they trust to respond to email correspondence. It is quite possible that such an employee might also be suitable to respond to blog comments that are not too specific in nature, or after sufficient training.

Subcontracted Bloggers

Many companies feel they are not quite “in-the-groove” to do their own blogging, and thus hire a specialist to blog on their behalf.

As an example, a very professional service is offered by Jim Turner of One By One Media, Bloggers For Hire.

Part of such a blogger’s responsibilities might well be monitoring and responding to the blogosphere, and part of that responding could be commenting on other blogs, especially if they linked to the corporate blog in response to an article.

That would be a paid comment

Outsourcing Blog Content and Comments

I haven’t actually had time to look around inside Blog Mastermind yet, but on my trip I spent a lot of time with many of Yaro’s own mentors. I am fairly confident that he doesn’t recommend doing all the blogging yourself, you would use outsourcing for blog posts, and quite possibly expect those outsourced bloggers to respond to comments, both on your own blogs, and those that might have linked to those blogs in response to articles.

Paid commenting again…

I noticed that Darren Rowse also has a special deal to sign up with Blog Mastermind for just $47 per month – if you want to be a problogger, but not tied to your keyboard 16 hours per day making peanuts, it might be a good option, and they have just done a free podcast that is worth a listen.

Outsource As Much As You Like

Many of my readers are probably familiar with Michel Fortin, one of, if not the greatest online direct response copywriters.

Far fewer are familiar with Sylvie Fortin, Michel’s wife who has been running a service called Workaholics for Hire for 8 years, providing outsourcing services, mostly behind the scenes for many of the internet’s most successful marketers.

As well as providing general purpose Virtual Assistants, they also provide a host of specialist services.

• Viability Research – for both niches and products
• Ebook Development
• Content writing – this includes blogs
• Product location for monetization
• Transcription Services
• Customer Support
• Blog Creation & Customization (a very hot offer if you need something professional)
• Sales Page Makeovers
• Webmasters on Call

Absolutely nothing controversial in that list at all, in fact I am sure many of my readers might be tempted to use some of those services, especially the blog creation and customization for one fixed fee.

It is in the blog promotion services that things if looked at in isolation become a little controversial.

• Article Marketing
• Blog Comment Marketing
• Discussion Board Buzz Marketing
• Blog Directory Submissions
• Free Classifieds Marketing
• Press Release Marketing
• Web Directory Submissions
• PPC Campaign Management

Blog comment marketing? Discussion Board Buzz Marketing? That can’t be right… can it?

Before you have some kind of knee-jerk reaction, it is something that is totally logical, and 100% ethical.

Paid Blog Commenting Can Be 100% Ethical

• You pay someone to research a niche you know nothing about
• You pay someone to create a product and sales page for a suitable niche
• You outsource a customized blog design
• You pay someone to write blog content to help promote the niche product
• You pay someone to provide customer support

So if you have all these services, obviously the only remaining task is promotion, and that might include some ethical forum marketing or even writing or responding to blog posts and blog comments.

If you can hire someone for that role for your company on a permanent basis, it is certainly just as ethical to hire someone part time working from home to do it as well, in fact it is more ethical than doing it yourself for a niche that you know very little about.

Other Opinions

Chris at Blog-Op couldn’t see much value and offered a great suggestion for quality traffic, get a review from me and spend the change on more conventional advertising.

Obviously that is good for me, but not always what someone in a specific niche is looking for. I am hardly going to review a squeeze page for a free dating book, and whilst I believe I have cultivated a high value audience, it is not a mass audience.
That review would be better suited to someone in the Make Money Online niche, or a high quality niche specific blog on sexual relationships such as Dan & Jennifer (nothing sexually explicit directly but discusses quite adult topics)
Note: Linking through to Dan and Jennifer has been gnawing away at the back of my mind for ages, as they are a true example of a quality niche site, and you should see how well they use video on YouTube – sometimes the encouragement to visit their site at the end of each video is as long as the content – really well done!

Dane on his new Wordpress Design Tips blog thinks it is a storm in a teacup and that things like this have been going on for years.
He is quite right, and anyone seriously interested in spamming your blog with junk is already doing it, and clock up 1000s of links per day, or more likely hit your spam filters as they are looking for soft targets.

One idiotic marketer from the UK has produced a “special report” with a list of dofollow blogs he spent a lot of time trying to find and is promoting it on Digital Point – what an idiot, you can find 300 dofollow blogs just by visiting my no nofollow community on Bumpzee, but unless you are going to write something really on topic that will bring targeted visitors and give you a decent relevant link, there is absolutely no point commenting, as the comments are unlikely to stick.
He is the same guy who has also come up with a Google Custom Search engine of dofollow blogs.

Conversation & Measuring Sticks

It is all about joining in the conversation. If the intent of a comment is clearly to join in the conversation and not just for SEO, that is an ethical comment. It is possible to join in discussions to sway them to your way of thinking, or entice people to click a link.

Related posts

• Wide Circles = Blog Comment Spam (28)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins (61)
• Exclusive: Blogcatalog vs Technorati? – Sharing The Love & Tagging (nofollow removed) (26)
• Do You Want a $200 Press Release Submission With PRWeb? For Free? (7)
• Wordpress SEO Masterclass For Competitive Niches (131)
• Wordpress Plugin: Nofollow Those Dupes (Wordpress SEO Masterclass Continued) (13)
• Wordpress Plugin: Antisocial (24)
• WordPress Plugin – Custom Query String – UTW Edition (31)
• WordPress Comment SEO Solutions (94)

There are all kinds of blogs in the blogosphere, and some of the logos created and used by supporters of the “cause” are a little on the tame side.

I will be adding the logos to the display in the no nofollow community soon.

You can grab an eye-catching logo design from Chuck.

Related posts

• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• How To Remove Nofollow On Moveable Type (4)
• Guru Internet Marketing Mentorship Programs Abusing Dofollow Blogs (36)
• Exclusive: No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee Community (33)
• DoFollow | No Nofollow – Highs & Lows (42)
• Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals (44)
• Are You A Fake Dofollow Blogger? (49)
• WordPress Comment SEO Solutions (94)

The No Nofollow Highs

Last week the No Nofollow | I Follow | Dofollow community on Bumpzee crossed the 100 member mark, and 100 blog mark. This week we are already up to 137 members and 132 blogs. What is more encouraging is that I see a lot of members actually using Bumpzee for browsing blogs.

Some interesting points:-

• 2nd Highest Number of blogs – the blogs were individually submitted to the community
• 4th Highest Number of Members – we could well overtake Jim’s How to be successful community in a couple of weeks.
• Many of the communities already overtaken have been established much longer

There are hundreds, even thousands of blogs I could add to the community, but I would really prefer people make the decision themselves.
Every blog included is vetted. I pick up lots of blogs that don’t have nofollow removed correctly, blogs made from affiliate datafeeds, blogs that are mainly resyndicated content, and even blogs with totally broken comment systems.

There are no requirement to use the Bumpzee widget to be listed, or the voting button, although blogs that do include the voting button do gain more traffic if their readers are Bumpzee aware.

If a blog doesn’t have a visibly active community, leaving comments on a regular basis, I am going to go snooping around and your chances of being included are reduced.

The community didn’t benefit from being the first on Bumpzee, such as the Affiliate Marketing community, and the first managed blogs such as the SEO/SEM, How To Be Successful, and Next Gen Marketing, the later communities I might add also had a few non-member blogs added.

The Lows – Dofollow Abuse

I suppose if you model yourself as the internet equivalent of Ghengis Kahn then the idea of charging people to have nofollow removed from their comments would be attractive, but I have noticed that many of John Chow’s readership (the grown up ones with money) don’t appreciate it.

If I was an advertiser buying reviews on Johns Blog, I would worry about how the quality of readership is deteriorating as his readership supposedly increases, though I am sure his readership will appreciate the male enhancement text ads.

Some of my readers have already been writing about this

Chris thinks this is a bit of a perversion of the Dofollow movement and goes on to say:-

Personally, there isn’t a blog on the planet that I would pay to have a followable comment link on, nor would I ever charge for one. Followable comment links are a nice thing to give away, but I just don’t feel there is any benefit at all to buying one. Well, apart from to Johns bank balance of course.

Webstractions gives lots of reasons why you shouldn’t pay for the links, and why you shouldn’t use the plugin John is selling on your own blog.

RT has actually already written twice about it, first of all in one of his drivebys where he said:-

After reading the news about it at Blog-Op and then reading the source article myself at John Chow dot Com, I’ve decided that John’s money-grabbing link whoring has turned me off for the last time. So much so that I’m removing his links from anything I have, including my feed reader. See ya later, John!

He later went into even more depth about John Chow:-

I may not have the best blog in the world (far from it) but I refuse to have it even remotely associated with bloggers that use or abuse their readers in any way, shape or form. Sure, their blogs are their blogs and they have the right to use them anyway they want. I’m sure it won’t bother them to lose just little old me as a reader, but if more people know and more people follow suit, I’m sure it’ll bother them a whole lot more.

The Paper Bull had equally strong words about John Chow

He can call it whatever he wants – but selling a $10 monthly membership to turn off the no-follow tag on comments is about as distasteful a scheme as I’ve seen in a while. Blogs are built upon conversation and are wholly dependent upon comments left by readers who valued the article enough to spend a few moments to tap out a response. Using comments as a means to extract coin is disgusting.

Reputation Management Lesson

Alienating your most valuable readers to gain more 13-year-old kids isn’t good practice.

Tip of the Nofollow / Dofollow Iceburg

Over the last 2 months the number of references to Dofollow shown in Google has increased by 50,000, and over the last 6 months it has more than doubled.
Whilst that is significant, I would love these isolated blogs to become part of the no nofollow community on Bumpzee where they can share their link love, and interact with blogs talking about similar subjects.

Only you can make it happen

Related posts

• Vlad Ripped Me Apart (5)
• How To Remove Nofollow On Moveable Type (4)
• Exclusive: No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Bumpzee Community (33)
• Are You A Fake Dofollow Blogger? (49)
• Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments? (65)
• Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins – Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks (385)
• No Nofollow | Dofollow Bloggers Get Funky (8)
• Guru Internet Marketing Mentorship Programs Abusing Dofollow Blogs (36)
• Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals (44)
• WordPress Comment SEO Solutions (94)