Site News – Updates & Changes
Chris McClelland | RSS | 9 CommentsFaster Indexing – We have increased the rate at which the website is now indexed by search engines and other spiders. The site is now completely reindexed every week. This should help commenters and also bring faster exposure to the site.
Comment Rule Changes – We have removed the 90 day restriction on do follow comments. Comments will now remain do follow on “published” posts/articles. Please note that only the first 20 comments on a post will be do follow. To check more on the new comment changes please visit the Comment Policy Page.
The following restriction has been removed from the comments rules:
After 90 days:
Author names change from a hyperlink to a non hyperlink.
All links in comments are changed from do follow to no follow.
Site News – New Features Update, Launch Date
Tags: spiders, author names, search engines
Amy | Sat, Jul 11 2009
I think that that makes perfect sense. The main problem when using the dofollow and keywordluv applications is that people tend to spam any page that seems to have lots of links. The limit of the first 20 posters will hopefully reduce this.
Hiro | Sat, Jul 11 2009
Yea I agree..good changes Chris.
Chris McClelland | Sat, Jul 11 2009
You’re right Amy, people do tend to spam this website alot, meaning about 40-50% of comments that are made are spam in a form of a way. However, the rate of spam comments to “real” comments has been falling each month and we hope to have it around 20% spam in a few months.
This is understandable and as the site becomes more popular we have been experiencing new forms of spam comments which we have had to find creative ways to deal with.
Limiting the amount of do follow links on a page is mainly for a few reasons, however it was not put into place to deter people from spamming the post/article(If it does however, it is good) that they are commenting on. It is meant to limit the number of outbound links on a page therefore giving more pr to each link on the page, basically rewarding the people who comment first.
Without it the more links(do follow comments) on a page the more dilution would occur thus giving less benefit for the link.
KeywordLuv is simply being used to allow commenters to use proper anchor text in their links without making comments as spammy looking. Such as it looks better for a comment to be from “Amy from Free Xbox 360″ than from “Free Xbox 360″. I have been fooling around with some design plans on the next version of this website that would build upon this concept into a better system that would look better and help people(commenters) out as well.
Thanks for your input Amy.
Hiro from Swing Trading | Wed, Jul 15 2009
Well Chris I think you are definitely expecting a certain level of spam to stimulate additional visitors/comments that are legit right? I think it’s a pretty good idea.
Are you changing pages older than 90 days to no-follow that your posts can actually have good PR when it’s preparing to be included by Google’s PR rank?
Chris McClelland | Wed, Jul 15 2009
Old comment way. Any comments older than 90 days become no follow.
New comment way. Comments stay do follow as long as post is on site.
I have been doing some testing on the old posts that have gotten some half decent page rank from various sources I use. While at first I thought that making the links no follow would certainly help old posts in the manner that the site would retain most of the pagerank internally and not leech it out due to more comments appearing on old posts. This would help because I could direct the pagerank to where I wanted it to go.
However, even though this would be good from a seo point of view, it really doesn’t help preserve any links that someone might have built up on the site. 90 days is not a lot of time to benefit from a link even if it is spidered quickly. On the other hand forever is well a bit long for a link to remain do follow but I think that it is for the best not only in building long term traffic but to ensure people that they are going to keep receiving something for their work/comments on the site. This leads to more repeat traffic from people to make more comments because if used properly can really help out.
Now the natural problem occurs when you have say an old post with a PR5 and like 50 comments on it, the pr leak from that post would be alot. Thus I set the max do follow links on a post to 20, so comments 21-XX how ever many are on a post can’t ever be do follow. This helps preserve outbound links and protects the people that comment on a post first. In the future as the site becomes more active I might raise this cap slightly.
Hopes this answer any questions that you have Hiro
Brian from Indiana Attorney | Fri, Jul 17 2009
This change makes perfect sense. I have lots of comment spam on one of my blogs and am trying to solve the problem with something like this also.
Steve from Fixed Index Annuity | Tue, Aug 04 2009
I think this is nice change, and the site is now completely reindexed every week. This should help commenters and also bring faster exposure to the site.
Phil from Free PS3 Slim | Wed, Aug 19 2009
Some good changes. I think the 20 post limit is good, will hopefully reduce spammy comments which is a problem with dofollow and keywordluv blogs. Hopefully you should be able to notice the difference!
Chris McClelland | Wed, Aug 19 2009
Actually as expected we are getting more spam comments as the site has become more popular. The ratio of real comments to spam comments is running higher than I would like, but my spam filters have been working rather well.
The filters still need to be tweeted, but doing so would force more real comments to the moderation. The plus side is more people are following the comments rules on the site, and more people are returning to make real comments.
I have noticed a good deal of paid comments submitted to the site. Some of the paid comments have been really bad, but a few manage to get at least one complete sentence written properly.
I wish I could find a comment filter for bad grammar, if anyone knows one please let me know.