David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

The comments on this blog have been free from the nofollow tag for some time now as I believe that relevant comments should be rewarded. If you've taken the time to read and comment on a post, you can quite happily post a link to your site which may be of benefit to readers of the blog.

However, comment spam is becoming more intelligent these days. Spammers are actually reading the blog! Because of this, I am changing the blog comment policy to reflect changes to the way I'm receiving comments.

The policy is a as follows.
 
Accepted Comments

Comments will be accepted and published so long as they meet the following criteria:

• The are clearly not an attempt to spam
• They are useful to other readers
• They are not simply a regurgitation of what is said in the article

Comments Which Will Be Deleted

These are mainly spam comments (the type that serve no obvious benefit to anyone) as well as offensive/abusive comments. It's a friendly, educational corner of the web over here. I intend to keep it that way!

Comments Which Will Be Edited

I will remove the backlink of comments that add no value whatsoever. This is what I brand as intelligent spam and is where the spammer has at least found keywords in the article. An example of what I suspect intelligent spam to be can be seen here. The comment doesn't appear to make much sense though it is clear that several keywords have been used from the article. Needless to say, this comment has had it's back link removed. As to has this comment where the comment URL was the affiliate network mentioned in the comment. That leads me to think that this is spammy so I removed all links.

Summary

The reason I don't use the nofollow tag is simply to encourage relevant thoughts and opinions on articles. However, spammers are becoming more intelligent and as a result, I've had to take this move to reduce the affect of such changes. Regular commenters or those that add real value to the blog and add informative comments that benefit other users will proposer from the benefits this blog offers commenters. Those who bend of break the rules will be penalised.

It's only fair.