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So you took the big step and removed no-follow tags from your blog’s comments and/or trackbacks? Great choice but it’s not quite over yet. There’s quite a few smart (at least by their reasoning) people that will try to trick your willingness to reward comments and links by using your blog as a free linkback service for their blogs.

How to find a DoFollow spam comment

The first thing to look for is the name of the commenter itself. Proper commenters use their name or online alias, or at most the domain name of their site. Spammers instead use keywords to promote relevancy to the page they’re linking to. So for example, someone with a blog about making money online would use “Make money blogging” as his name, so he would get a link to his blog with relevant keywords.

Also the link url is always suspect. Beware of deep linking. I had a guy comment on my “7 most annoying things bloggers have on their sites” article with the name “Blogging tools” and the url pointing to his blogging tools category on his blog. Smart yes? Well.. not really. Nice try, but when i do decide to run a free link service, I’ll be sure to announce it.

Comments on old posts can be used for the same reason. An older, well linked post with PageRank is a good target for a spammer to get some links back to his page. Use this handy plug in to automatically close comments and trackbacks on older posts.

I also make it a habit to follow links from commenter to check out their site and will generally delete comments with links that point to made-for-AdSense sites and article scraper sites.

DoFollow spam is obnoxious and annoying. It provides little to no value to the discussion, most spammers will just try to stroke the poster’s ego and make it look like they are contributing.