Stupid question: When is it SPAM?

To me it’s polite spam. They obey the rules and stay relevent, but they get their uri on your page to be indexed by Google.

Clever.

You don’t appear to be using the nofollow rel tag on your commenter’s links. Is that intentional? Because I think that that is the default in WordPress, so you had to disable it intentionally in some way.

Anyway, with a nofollow rel, this sort of “spam” is pointless for people to do, since Google ignores nofollow labelled links. So it doesn’t help them to do it. Not that that stops them from trying link-farm spam anyway, but still, it’s something to consider turning back on.

If I was a spammer, I’d certainly make lists of blogs not using nofollow tags in their links, and post comments on those more often, because they’d benefit me more.

Otto, I’m glad you’re not a spammer!

I don’t use the nofollow thingy for reasons described here and here and here.

…Our link spammer cares about click-throughs. Nofollow is completely irrelevant to click-throughs…

…If your blog software inserts nofollow, then in order for you to give another blog Google juice, you have to go out of your way to link to them without nofollow, such as in your blogroll. It is no longer enough that your reader left an insightful comment or a trackback to his blog with more information. Now, as far as Google juice is concerned, it is as if all of your readers were never there and you had received no comments or trackbacks at all.

That’s what Google wanted all along.

—Michael Hampton, “Nofollow revisted”

I disabled my nofollow with Angsuman’s plugin.

Edited to add quotes.

Nonsense. Google can easily recognize a blog from a non-blog. All they have to do is look at the number of links. Sites with excessive links would simply get lowered in the Pagerank. If that’s what they were trying to do.

No, the reason for the nofollow tag is twofold. Denying spammers, as previously stated, and allowing Google to recognize link farms and distinguish them from blogs. They simply don’t count nofollow links as links.

I would not be surprised if not having nofollow on your blog *reduced* your pagerank.

You think so? I don’t understand how page rank works and therefore can’t respond to that statement… perhaps someone else can.

My readership has increased over the year, though. Not by a great deal, but enough to make me happy.

“But then, am I saying only bloggers are allowed to comment on my blog?”

I hope not. What you have is a public website, so anybody should be allowed to comment. After all, that’s the whole point of allowing comments, surely? Looking at the three examples you gave, I agree with samboll: it’s “polite spam”, for the lack of a better definition.

All these people are trying to do is establish links to their websites in an “old fashioned” kind of way by entering (what certainly appears to me to be) meaningful and relevant content and using a link to their website as a signature.

You think so? I don’t understand how page rank works and therefore can’t respond to that statement… perhaps someone else can.

Nobody outside Google really knows the Pagerank algorithim.

However, if *I* was doing it, that’s one of the things *I* might do to recognize and eliminate link farms. For every page on the net, count the links on it. Graph the numbers. Link farms are going to be on the high end. Penalize them for having too many links.

Blogs will also be on the high end. So if they use nofollow, we don’t count nofollow links. This puts them back into the low end, thus preventing them from getting punished for the high number of links.

And frankly, I do disagree with most of the links posted above about why nofollow is bad. Blog noise was a real issue on Google. After nofollow was implemented, it became less of an issue. When I do a search and get a blog, it’s usually because that blog has actual content, instead of a link to another blog which has a link to another blog and so on. I don’t feel like visiting 5 blogs to get to the actual meat of the thing I’m looking for. Sorry if that upsets other bloggers, but hey, if they post actual content worth reading, then they’re not the problem people that I’m talking about.

Content worth having will get you high search ranking. Thousands of worthless links to other people’s content will not. That’s the way it should be.

> Nonsense. Google can easily recognize a blog from a non-blog.

It isn’t easy to identify blogs. Many normal sites are heavily interlinked too. They might look for RSS feeds but then again normal sites do that too. My Joomla based corporate site is not a blog and yet it provides RSS feeds.

Otto said> I would not be surprised if not having nofollow on your blog *reduced* your pagerank.

That is wrong concept. Disabling Nofollow merely exericises your capability to give value to an outgoing link. If your outgoing link value is x then having n outgoing links will distribute it by giving x/n weightage to each outgoing links.

Disabling nofollow *does not decrease your Pagerank*.

There is another misconception on nofollow. Google actually follows nofollow links. However it doesn’t give weight to them based on the linkage. So nofollow is not a way to hide your pages from Google or other search engines.

“Sorry if that upsets other bloggers, but hey, if they post actual content worth reading, then they’re not the problem people that I’m talking about.”

Well said. This is something which annoys me as well and it’s also what contributes to the “pollution” of the web. While linking is the essence of what the web is about, it’s probably fair to say that unless your article is going to contribute something original, then it probably shouldn’t be published in the first place.

Hmmmm. Well….. hmmmm. This smacks of the elitist attitude spewed by a computer magazine bigwig in the early 90’s when he stated that “vanity sites” would choke the ‘net and cause the death of the internet before it had a chance to live.

One person’s trash is another’s treasure. I don’t think I’m personally in favor of artificially limiting the value of anything based on any individual’s preconceived notions of said “valuation”.

Yes, some things are (probably) instantly obviously spam. But then again, statements like “unless your article is going to contribute something original, then it probably shouldn’t be published in the first place.” remain personal opinion only – because your opinion of value and originality may be VERY far from the opinion of someone on the other side of the world, or from mine.

“I would not be surprised if not having nofollow on your blog *reduced* your pagerank.”

That remark is absolutely ridiculous.

thx =)

“But then again, statements like ‘unless your article is going to contribute something original, then it probably shouldn’t be published in the first place.’ remain personal opinion only – because your opinion of value and originality may be VERY far from the opinion of someone on the other side of the world, or from mine.”

Of course it’s personal opinion. I wasn’t intended to be anything else. Perhaps you misunderstood me?

While I don’t support sensoring or denial of anyone’s right to express themselves, I see a LOT of rubbish on the web, especially in blogs. While I respect everyone’s right free speech, I don’t necessarily respect what they have to say, if all they’re going to do is speak gibberish. And there’s an awful lot of gibberish out there.

pizdin_dim: I see a lot (and probably post my share) of useless blather. Your post came across as being inherently intent on censorship – as in your position is that no one should post anything not of value in your opinion.

So at the very least, you might have qualified your statement by prefacing it with “in my opinion”.

I simply posted an “opinionated” statement of my own in rebuttal.

Vkaryl: Fair enough. I’ve just assumed that those types of statements would only ever be interpreted as opinions. I have re-read what I said and to me it still only sounds like an opinion, instead of an instruction, for instance.

The ironic thing is that I could have easily interpreted your “desire” that I preface my opinions with the words “in my opinion” as a form of censorship.

It’s funny how different people interpret written words, isn’t it?