Comment from Tom
Time: June 30, 2008, 10:41 pm

Ben, you big Nazi!

(Just kidding… I think this makes sense.)

I would disagree with the ‘deliberate intention to provoke’ bit, though. I mean if you’re talking about inflammatory comments then yes, but being provocative isn’t always a bad thing.

Comment from Bill
Time: June 30, 2008, 11:42 pm

@Tom - of course provoking a constructive debate is a good thing (and pretty much a requirement for a blog such as this). However I assume Ben is talking about comments that contribute nothing apart from provoking a slagging match.

Unfortunately there seem to be a few people intent on hi-jacking the site (you might have missed the nasty comments since they get deleted pretty quickly) so I guess we need to be on best behaviour, well for the time at least

Comment from Edith
Time: July 1, 2008, 12:56 am

@ Tom,

Nazis wouldn’t have a problem with racist, abusive, or sexist comments…

Comment from Jonk
Time: July 1, 2008, 1:52 am

Nice one Edith.

What’s your policy on using keywords in the “name” section of the commenter Ben?

Comment from Ben
Time: July 1, 2008, 8:07 am

@Jonk, people can put what name they like within reason, but as for using keywords, I don’t think it does any good in terms of SEO, I suspect the Goog is trained to ignore wordpress comments.

@Tom - yes, inflammatory comments are what I’m referring to. Those designed to deliberately wind up the Spanish that visit the site for example.

@Andrew, your comment was silly and inflammatory, therefore not approved.

Comment from Tom
Time: July 1, 2008, 8:56 am

@ Edith - touché!

Comment from Parubin
Time: July 1, 2008, 9:42 am

I still don’t quite understand how some people still are fond of constant provocation. Even when an easy, light-headed, good-hearted, uncontroversial and naive nice post comes (such as Spain winning the Euro Cup) still some one finds a quick way to make a annoying and silly comment intended to start a trashy nonsense series of comments full of bab vives.

I prefer to take no notice to these comments, but still sometimes I find myself entering the stupid game of responding to trollish unintelligent provokation.

These type of comments generate traffic but add no value (at least my understanding of value) to the site, which could end up like a franchise of garbage sites like 20-minutos or The Sun or whatever (all of the very successful in terms of traffic, by the way).

There is always the eternal debate of sustainable quality of the content vs. repercusion, but I’m sure 99% of the regular visitors to this forum are interested more in the first than in the latter. At least me, if a was interested about a slagging contest I’d run to look up some other place, more suitable for that, than NFS.

Comment from Dean Hunt
Time: July 1, 2008, 10:48 am

Jonk - Wordpress uses the nofollow tag as default, so it would be of zero use in Google.

Dean

Comment from luke
Time: July 1, 2008, 12:52 pm

This site is a positive and realistic view of Spain. Any abusive comments just bring shame to those who have written them. I imagine most of them come from lonely teenagers who will, hopefully, one day grow up to be intelligent, caring adults.

Comment from Edith
Time: July 1, 2008, 6:00 pm

@ Parubin,

I agree entirely!

@ Jonk,

Ben has already answered yiur question.

Comment from Tom - politics and culture from barcelona - Clarke
Time: July 1, 2008, 6:30 pm

@ Dean - I don’t think that the nofollow tag is applied to commenters’ names (at least, it isn’t here, or on my own WP installations). That said, I think Ben’s right in that blog commenters’ names are given a fairly low rank by Google.

Comment from Stanley
Time: July 1, 2008, 7:16 pm

Am I allowed to say xxxxxxx? (Edit by Ben, NO!)

Comment from gary
Time: July 1, 2008, 10:53 pm

@ stanley, you just did!

@ Parubin - its mischievous attention seeking and an adolescent yearning to see how far you can push it before it snaps. Things now seem to be back to normal.

Comment from Jonk
Time: July 2, 2008, 12:36 am

Tom, it’s my understanding that Wordpress does automatically add the nofollow tag to comments.

However, while the link doesn’t pass PageRank, Google actually still does visit the link in most cases. I generally get pages indexed by leaving comments on the (No-Follow) website JohnChow.com.

While I would say it’s a waste of time going on a linking campaign by commenting on No-Follow blogs, it takes the same time to type a keyword-stuffed name. If you look at it from a cost-benefit attitude it’s worth thinking about.

Comment from Ray
Time: July 2, 2008, 9:10 am

Every blog worth reading has to remind its commenters every once in awhile… there’s actually real people on the other end of the keyboard.

It’s a good thing, too, as sometimes I forget.

Comment from Tom
Time: July 2, 2008, 11:47 am

@Jonk - Hmm… well I checked the source for this very page. The rel=’nofollow’ or rel=’external nofollow’ only shows up on links to NFS feeds or in the ‘Recent Comments’ widget in the sidebar. I can’t see how it could be happening if it doesn’t show up in the code for this page, or on my own blog.

Unless we’re talking at cross purposes.

Comment from Ben
Time: July 2, 2008, 11:54 am

I think the nofollow only shows up in links that are posted IN comments themselves. Like this:

http://www.notesinspanish.com (is great )

Comment from Ben
Time: July 2, 2008, 11:56 am

Yes, a no follow was added automatically to the link above. But I really doubt that keyword laden ‘name’ fields in wordpress blog comments does much for pagerank, the Goog will have covered that.

Comment from gary
Time: July 2, 2008, 12:37 pm

It just seems to me that having good and interesting content is the only way to ‘game’ Google - ie not game them at all but deal with people not algorythms…

I enjoyed these articles

http://www.internet-based-business-mastery.com/index.php?s=buzz+marketing

Comment from Jonk
Time: July 2, 2008, 2:31 pm

Ben yeh you’re right 100% about the PR thing. I think what people angle for is the relevance thing… Although I just did some research and it says that it doesnt pass on relevance at all.

@ Tom as far as I understand the Nofollow attribute for the comment names is added elsewhere, in the Meta Tags or something like that. And then whichever spider automatically doesn’t pass PR on the names.

It’s an interesting topic.

Anyway this sounds bad but I have a PR5 and a PR6 blog and I have taken nofollow off the comments there, and regularly slip in my own comments linking back to my other sites.

Comment from Matt NY
Time: July 7, 2008, 3:10 pm

Apparently you also need to watch out for comments that other people post on your blog, because in Spain you can be held accountable for them.

I just read this article about a blogger who was sued by the SGAE, (the General Society of Authors and Publishers) or the Spanish RIAA, for having a post on his blog in which, the court says, the comments that were left damaged the “honor” of the SGAE.

The article asks, “The questions then raised: is it safe for anyone is Spain to offer open comments on a blog? and is this even a legal under European law?”

Comment from Matt NY
Time: July 7, 2008, 3:11 pm

http://www.inquisitr.com/1504/spanish-riaa-sues-and-wins-blog-comment-case/

and there’s the article.

Comment from Jonk
Time: July 7, 2008, 5:08 pm

That’s bizarre. Free speech FTW

Comment from Perro Callejero
Time: July 16, 2008, 10:07 pm

Sorry I’m a bit late on this, and I wasn’t going to bring it up, but since I see this post I thought it might be opportune to ask.

I posted a comment on a post several weeks ago that was not inflammatory at all, did not include language, etc. It appeared, but a day later it was gone. Did I do something wrong? I certainly didn’t mean to, I just wanted to ask so I could avoid it in the future!

The only thing I could think of is that sometimes I forget which I used last and put “Perro Callejero” or “Jordan” in the name box, so I guess that might fall into the “two different names, same IP” rule.

Comment from Ben
Time: July 16, 2008, 11:23 pm

Hi PC/Jordan, that is weird, we have a spam filter that automatically does a great job of filtering out all the bad comments, but it is weird that yours came and then went. I know who you are (as in you are a cool forum member) so I find it really hard to believe I would have deleted your comment without realising. So many apologies and please keep posting!