I am a little concerned about people leaving links to product sales sites though.

Before I leave my own links, I always stop and think to myself first “would I allow this link in a comment left on my blog?” If the answer’s no, then I’d change it to something else.

Generally, I check to see two things with the sales page in the link:

Does the site contain annoying pop ups or pop unders?
Does the sales site belong to the person leaving the comment or is it an affiliate redirect?*

If the answer to either of the above questions is true, then I remove the link altogether.

*I don’t know why, but I have a pet peeve with people trying to promote affiliate links within the comments — well, actually, I don’t mind if they promote affiliate links that are relevant. What I don’t like is when people explicitly try to hijack your entry (which contains your affiliate links) with their own affiliate links. LOL

I’ve also found that a lot of people dropping links to product shopping sites tend to use anchor text like “brand name shoes” after their name and are probably, most likely, paid comments. Definitely unacceptable.

~ Teli

~ Teli

I am a little concerned about people leaving links to product sales sites though.

If a friend (like you), puts one in, I’ll probably let it get in.

But if it’s someone I don’t recognize sticking in a MFA (Made for adsense) site, it’d go in the bin. Unless they had some outstanding content.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Thanks,
~ Teli

Not too long ago, I wrote an article about Akismet and the necessity of scanning the queue for any false positives, but one of the key points was: Who wants to trawl through thousands of comments for that one lonely false positive?

Andrew, you couldn’t have been more right with your post. I’ve seen one too many “nice job, this helped me a lot” comments waiting for me in my moderation queue. Frankly, I’ve dubbed it human submitted spam because someone had to answer the challenge question I have up.

It’s the commenter’s responsibility to use common sense when interacting on the web. Unfortunately, too many people are in too much of a hurry to leave a well thought out comment. Their main objective is just to get the backlink. *sigh*

~ Teli

If you overdeliver, naturally they’ll ask what you have for sale because they want to get more of you.

At least that’s the way it’s worked out for me.

When you see 500+ comments for moderation each day, that’s a sign that it’s time for more spam filter plugins.

Yes, it’s a challenge to balance between the “freedom of the internet” and the junk that gets through the filters.

Maybe Jason Calacanis might have some solutions at his Affiliate Summit West keynote next month.

I guess it depends on your threshold for pain.

I use Akismet, Bad Behavior and Did You Pass Math?

I started with just Akismet, and it got to the point where I was reviewing hundreds of spam comments a day.

So I added Did You Pass Math? and for a while there was no problem. But a couple months ago, I started getting hit hard with those two plugins.

I added Bad Behavior to the mix, and now I get very little spam.