Comment Guidelines

I don’t enjoy having to write this post, but I’m getting sick of having to weed through spam comments.

If you have left a comment on this site and it didn’t appear, it is most likely because me or my spam filter declared you as being spam.

This is the official set of rules for commenting on my blog. I’ll be linking to this post in the future so everyone knows the rules. Here are the basic rules:

Name

If you put in some keyword you are trying to rank for on Google, you will be flagged as spam no matter how relevant and meaningful the comment is. You can use your real name or you can use a nickname, I don’t care. However, “cheap rental cars” is not a name and you are just trying to use my site for your SEO. I didn’t create this site for your SEO purposes.

URL

You can put almost anything here and I really don’t care. The only exception is if the Akismet spam filter I run flags your URL as being a spam site. I might check the URL out myself or I might not. However, the URL field is for URL’s so if you do have “cheap-hotels-in-vegas.info” I’m cool with that. Just know that all URL’s in the comments are nofollow, so don’t think it is going to help you in any meaningful SEO way.

Comment

I don’t object to putting URL’s in the comment field so long as they are relevant to what you are saying. If you visited a place I took a photo of and want to share a link to your photos, I have no problem with that. If your link has obvious keyword text you are trying to SEO for, especially if it is the same URL you put in the URL field, you will get marked as spam. Like the URL field, URL you put here is automatically nofollow, because I have no control over comment links.

Be civil in your comments. I have no problem if you disagree with me. Many people do. Just be civil about it and don’t call anyone, especially other people, names. After almost 10,000 comments on my site, I’ve only had to delete one comment in three years for this reason.

I have made mistakes in the past and probably will again in the future. If you catch a mistake, feel free to point it out in the comments. Grammar or spelling mistakes will be corrected, factual errors will be struck through with the correct information replacing the old information. Comments correcting errors will be kept up.

Summary

I’m not stupid. I know when people are commenting just to plug a link or get some SEO value. That is the #1 reason why comments don’t make it on my site. I am very picky about this.

If you want a link from my site, your only options are 1) to provide me with an exceptional service if you are a company, 2) meet me in real life if you are a blogger, or 3) submit your URL to my travel blog directory (blogs only).

Thank you, and lets us never speak of this again.

6 thoughts on “Comment Guidelines”

  1. Must resist urge to be sarcastic and put spammy link in comment….
    *whew glad that passed. I don’t really have any of these problems any more. I did when I was on WP.com but since I’ve been self hosting through WP.org Askimet has done all I’ve needed pretty much.

  2. Kinda bitchy, but useful, thanks. I’m a new blogger and slowly catching on to SEO spammers. Recently I wondered why someone would be randomly commenting about buying real estate on a post about camping. I used the WordPress “mark as spam” button– boom, done. At the time I felt kind of bad about it but now? Not so much.

  3. Sounds eminently reasonable to me. I get hit by spammers sometimes, and while my anti-spam stuff works pretty well, some slip through. Pretty simple to delete for me, as volumes are only a few comments a day, but a pain. With your traffic volumes, well, I’m sure it can be a real chore.

  4. I finally had to resort to a CAPTCHA plugin on my site. I don’t get nearly your level of traffic, but the constant fake user creations, spam posts, etc was just too much.

    Your guidelines seem pretty reasonable. If only most people were reasonable. :)

    -Jot

  5. I’ve been having alot of trouble with spammers recently on my own blog despite using the NoSpamNX plugin (which on the most part does the job). The last week i’ve come across a whole new kind of spammer one that copies my replies to my comments, posts it as their own under a name like Amy with the name linking to Great Loans or Top Credit Cards kinda stuff! It’s really annoying! Do they not think i’ll notice that I wrote that comment in the first place!!!

  6. Interesting post! We don’t have problem with borderline spammers yet in our blog, but we did get a lot of obvious spam, that Akismet conveniently catches. Maybe as time goes by, I will get more if these borderline spammers…

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