Learn to build links or stop doing it!

<rant>

I’ve had this blog for some years now, and the amount of spam have gone up and down several times. But one thing I don’t understand is some of the comments people put here. I know that a lot of the comments that I need to moderate is coming from automated programs, or bots, but still. I’ve included some of the dumbest comments I’ve recieved on this site and have saved, I’m sure I’ve received plenty of stupid comments that went to /dev/null.

On the post titled Transmission bittorrent client on OpenWRT I received this comment:

Beautiful photos! I appreciate the post so much! xoxo

Hmm.. Well thank you very much. If only there were any photos on that page. I’m guessing this was a bot. Trash that comment.

My post about Improving randomness and entropy in ubuntu 9.10 received to funny comments, both written by humans.

Good solution Ximin. Brent, home Linux users absolutely need need higher level of randomness and entropy. This is a good post and conversation.

Okay, whats a Ximin and why are you calling me Brent? That’s not my name. To the spam with it!

Great post Brent!

I love how it improves the randomness of things like private keys.

Okay, most important, STOP CALLING ME BRENT! Secondly, either we’re dealing with someone who have no clue what he is talking about, or someone who is VERY enthusiastic about “the randomness of things like private keys”. I call spammer!

</rant>

So, you might be thinking that this is just one of those blog posts written to blow of steam, but no. I’m going to give you a bit of advice on how to build links.

Don’t use automatic programs…

… unless you REALLY know what you are doing. Most people don’t! It’s possible to write a comment that’s broad enough to gather a decent list of blog posts that are all pertaining the same subject. For instance, letting a program search for dofollow blogs about photography and then posting a comment with a name like London wedding photographers, saying

I like your post about photography, I never thought about it that way before. Thanks

will (hopefully) get you zero approved comments.

Read the blog post you are commenting on

It’s not that hard to read a blog post, and chances are that your comment will stick if you at least sounds like you’ve read what it says. If you can’t find something smart to say, ask a question about something in the blog, but don’t make it obvious that you’re asking the question just for the sake of asking it.

Don’t use keywords in the name field

It looks spammy as fsck! Most bloggers have a policy about comments with keywords in the name field, that policy is to ignore that comment and put it in the spam queue. That will do you no good. If you really want keywords in the name field, find blogs using keywordluv (like my blog does) and utilize that.

Write longer comments

and by that, I don’t mean “write a short story”… Write comments that are at least 50 words long. It might be hard to write 50 words about something that you don’t know anything about, but if you can’t manage to do that, don’t write the comment.

Conclusion

So, is that it? No, of course not. These are just the guidelines I use when posting a comment, and I would like you to use these guidelines too, so the internet will be a less spammy place for all of us.

Do you have a set of guidelines you use when you write blog comments? Do you utilize things like keywordluv and commentluv efficiently? Please comment on this.