Maria’s Guides

One drawback to a WordPress plugin.

Back in November, I wrote a post about a new plugin I’d installed on my two main blog-based sites: Maria’s Guides and An Eclectic Mind. The plugin is called CommentLuv and it automatically retrieves and displays a link for the last post a commenter added to his or her blog. Here are some examples from the post I wrote about CommentLuv, where I invited people to try it out.

The idea behind CommentLuv is to encourage people to comment by automatically linking back to their blog. I think it’s a great idea — when used by people who have real content to contribute in comments.

On the surface, CommentLuv is extremely attractive to spammers who keep blogs. Not only can they include a relatively normal looking comment with a link to their blog when they enter it in the Web site field of the comment form, but they also have an automatic link to their most recent work. Two links for the time it takes to post one, right? And that second link can give readers an idea of what their blog is all about by including the title of the most recent post.

What these people don’t seem to realize is that the CommentLuv link is created with a “nofollow” attribute. So if they think they can improve search engine optimization (SEO) by adding links to their sites on the sites they comment on, they’re wasting their time. The links are not recognized by Google or any other search engine or automated tool.

But what I’ve seen lately is a number of the same people coming back, again and again, to post comments like “Great post! I’ll keep checking in.” These comments usually appear on recent posts and, with some commenters, they appear several times a week. This gets past my spam prevention software and ends up on my blog.

While most people wouldn’t mind the added comments with their apparently complementary content, this isn’t content. It’s spam. There’s nothing being contributed to the site other than two free links for the commenter. So I delete these comments regularly.

Now I’m not suggesting that you avoid CommentLuv. I still think it’s a great plugin. But I do want users to be aware of its attraction for spammers. On a popular blog, installing CommentLuv could add about 10 minutes a week to your spam maintenance routine — after all, you have to manually decide whether a comment is legitimate or posted solely to attract hits for the commenter’s blog. Adding a regular abuser to your blacklist might be a good course of action.

Want to learn more about WordPress? Check out WordPress 2: Visual QuickStart Guide by Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan, published by Peachpit Press. It’s available from Amazon.com and in all major bookstores.