Last week I did something very different from my norm. I didn’t write a new blog post on this blog or my business blog… or any of my other blogs. I wrote one for my accountant’s blog, but that’s about it. That in and of itself isn’t much of a surprise, because I’ve done that before. What’s different is the reason I didn’t write anything.
I got to the end of last week, ready to write a new blog post… when I realized that I hadn’t received a single comment on the previous post. That’s pretty rare; I usually get at least one comment on everything. The last time I hadn’t gotten a comment on a post was the summer of 2015, and that’s because I wrote some specific marketing articles that I removed a few weeks later. The last time I wrote an article that didn’t get any comments… May 25, 2010! Continue reading →
I didn’t write anything last week; well, that’s kind of a misnomer. I wrote an article for my accountant’s blog, but that’s it. I decided to take a week off to get my mind straight and come to grips with a problem many of us bloggers have… that being some of the comments on our blogs. To better describe it… I’m going to start with a little story.
I played piano from the age of 10 until the age of 40. It was a pretty interesting 30 years that started inauspiciously enough and ended with a standing ovation. Continue reading →
Isn’t that nice? Looks like a great comment doesn’t it? Unfortunately, not only isn’t it a good comment, it’s actually spam. How do I know this?
Look at the comment again. Do you have any idea what article it was made on? For that matter, isn’t this the type of comment that could go on any article you read, only changing the name?
Oh yeah; it already has shown up on many articles. Not on my blog, but here and here and here and here. Actually, it comes up over a thousand times if you do the search; now that’s a shame!
On two of these blogs the writer of the article responded to it as if it was a real comment; I thought I should tell them but decided to keep it to myself, so only you wonderful readers will know the truth.
Something I’ve written about in the past is learning how to recognize spam that can make it through your spam filters. It looks like a real comment, but if it doesn’t address the article in any way then you know it’s fake. For instance, here’s another fake comment I received:
Well done Mitch. You have nicely explained the rules of marketing with details. great work
That was pretty lame wasn’t it? It actually went to my Pending area only because I use CommentLuv Premium, where I was able to then download Anti Backlinker and tell it to put any comment without a gravatar into moderation. Since many of you don’t have the first, you can’t get the second, so it’s possible you’ll have comments like this on your blog. Actually, it shows up on Google over 2,300 times with a slight variation after the first few words of the sentence.
Speaking of not really trying…
I read your full article and its really interesting a lot. Thank You For providing us great articles…
Come on now; I’m almost insulted that someone wasted their time with that. lol Actually, depending on what you might want to check this one comes up the fewest number of times, but it’s still repeated… must be relatively new.
How about one more:
Very interesting. I finished up my post for today yesterday and it posted in the wee hours when I was still asleep and yet you and I make some very similar points right down to the Morgan Freeman quote.
As I said in my post, though I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and knew no black people whatsoever, I was pretty aware of a lot of black history. I don’t remember it being taught in school so maybe I got it from television.
I like to hear the entire scope of history and not isolated bits extracted for some specific agenda.
This is only a sample. It’s pretty good isn’t it? It was actually a very long comment and it might have fooled most people. How did I know it was spam? Because it was an actual comment that someone else wrote on this article from February that, because I remembered us having a conversation about it at the time, and the comment not fitting on the article it showed up on, I knew was spam. This one was at least creative, if misplaced.
This is the kind of thing that many people miss because it’s a legitimate comment… just not on the right article, which made it easy. Sometimes it’s on the same article which makes it difficult; I’ve missed that a few times here and there.
Overall I’m pretty lucky when it comes to spam. The truly bad and fake stuff almost always finds its way into the spam filter, with some occasionally making it into preview mode. However, sometimes they end up on this blog or one of my other blogs, and for the most part I know it’s spam and I get rid of it pretty quickly.
Here’s a truth; not all spam is intentionally spam. Some are just bad comments left by people who think saying “nice post” has any meaning to the writer. You need to get rid of those comments as quick as possible also because if your blog looks like one that will accept them, you’ll have all sorts of bad comments and spam showing up on your site and the search engines will think your site isn’t worth bothering with.
There’s always a question whether or not search engines look at blog comments. I doubt that’s the case. However, I tend to believe that their bots will see lousy comments, notice that the links are a bit dodgy, and penalize the site in some way. Do you want that happening to your blog when you’re spending so much time trying to write great content?
Just a bit of a tutorial for you on this Monday morning. Happy blogging and moderating to you all! 😉
Addendum: – You won’t believe this but if you look at the comments below you’ll see that someone came by & left the exact same comment that I highlighted at the beginning of this post; ridiculous! I removed the information from that comment so the guy wouldn’t get any benefit but shared it so we could call it out. However, it came from someone calling himself Abdul Samadessani, email address abdulsamadessani5@gmail.com, website bloggingearning.com and Twitter handle @samad_100. I’ve sent contact via Twitter calling him out or whomever he hired; let’s see if he responds. Until he does, go ahead and abuse this guy because, trust me, you’ll probably be seeing this same comment on your blog one of these days, if it’s not already there.
I have a few consistent commenters on this blog. Most of them I’ve known for quite a few years and they’re pretty popular commenters on the blogosphere as well. And yet, some of them have an interesting problem.
They’re comments have been showing up in my spam filter, and spam filters of other blogs they comment on. They didn’t do anything wrong as far as they knew, and as far as I knew either. One day their comments were showing up fine, the next day and every time after that they were going to spam.
Now, I do have some settings where some people are going to go to spam. One too many words in the name field, email addresses that begin with certain words… that’s where you’re heading. If I’ve named you as spam and added your IP address, you’re going to spam. But that’s not what was going on with these folks.
A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to check something out. I was talking to Brian at Hot Blog Tips about it and I asked him to send a comment to me using his smartphone. He did and his comment showed up without going into the spam filter. He thought that maybe it was coming from a different IP address.
I then wrote our buddy Adrienne about it in the private message area of Facebook and asked her to try the same thing. It worked for her as well. However, when I looked at her IP address I noticed it was the same as her normal comments, and when I looked at Brian’s I noticed the same thing. So it wasn’t the IP address.
But I had the mind working well at this juncture. I asked Adrienne to pull up a different browser and send me a comment. She did and it went through; yippee! I told her it worked and asked her which browser she normally used, and she said Chrome.
I then reached out to Brian and asked him to try leaving a comment on my blog using a different browser. At the same time I asked Mitchell Allen if he’d try leaving a comment on this blog using a different browser as well. Both of them did & their comments came through just fine.
What browser were they all using? Chrome! In my mind, it was a pretty good experiment and possibly the reason so many people were ending up in spam filters around the world! Well, that might be dramatic, but one of my friends is in India and he always goes to spam, and I’m not sure which browser he uses.
Now, whenever I see something like this that looks like a pattern, I always go to Google to see if there’s anyone else mentioning it. There were lots of topics that looked like it, but they were all talking about something else. So maybe I get to scoop them all! 🙂
Meanwhile, Adrienne decided to try something else first. What she did was uninstall Chrome, reboot her computer, run her antivirus program, reload Chrome, and try again. This time her comment came through perfectly; problem solved.
The only question would be what’s in Chrome that could be affecting so many people? Well, there’s a second question, which is what if it’s not just Chrome users this is affecting? Anyone else who shows up in the spam filter isn’t a regular writer, at least yet, so I don’t know if the initial problem could happen with other browsers and could be solved by switching.
So, this is a twofold testing question for all of you. One, if you notice that your comments, or the comments of someone who comments on your blog often, seems to be going into the spam filter, ask them to try a different browser to see if their comment comes through fine. If it does, ask them what browser they originally used and let’s find out if it’s a Chrome thing (by the way, I’m a Firefox user). Tell them that if they want to continue using their regular browser to try uninstalling, then reinstalling to see if that takes care of things (running the virus program wouldn’t hurt, but I’m not sure if that’s a part of it or not).
If it doesn’t, then it’s possible they’re really on a blacklist, which is a totally different issue and one I’m not ready to address right now. Still, I know I’ve taken care of a couple of people who comment so far, and maybe we can help some other people as well. As an addition, I was talking to Adrienne about this and supposedly some people have found that if they leave everything off before the domain name that it seems to work for them & CommentLuv still works. So try domainname.com to see if that might cure your issue also.
Wow, how time flies. It was just over two years ago that I wrote a post asking people to check their blog commenting systems because many times when I comment on their blogs I’m not receiving anything telling me my comments have been responded to. That post was well received, and got a nice number of responses.
You know what? It seems that it’s time to bring this subject up again, and in a weird way it ponies on a topic Brian, Sheryl and I were talking about once in a video. I was lamenting how it seems that so many times I visit blogs that have titles making me think I’m going to see something new, only to see the same, tired thing I’ve seen previously. And Brian said that even if something is old to us because we’ve been around a long time, it’s a new concept to someone.
That being the case, I’m bringing this up because I figure that many of you aren’t intentionally ignoring me and my comments. The thing is I visit so many blogs and many new ones that I don’t often remember where I’ve been. If I’ve been to your blog often I’ll at least remember to check back on that one but many others… nope, no clue. Thus, I might be thinking you’re a blankety-blank when in reality your commenting system isn’t letting people know you’ve responded to them. By the way, I always check the boxes asking to be informed of responses, though not all of you have that on your blogs.
What should you do to check things out? As I said two years ago (just so everyone knows I’m being consistent lol), go to your blog post (you might have to sign out or use a different browser), sign in as if you’re leaving a comment but use a different email address, write yourself a comment (make it short), and after you get your notification of your comment go into your blog, respond to yourself, and see if your other email address gets it.
You can do this on an existing post (if you do, I’d recommend being the first commenter so you’re the only one who’ll see it & you can delete both before anyone else sees it) or create a test post and go through the motions, then delete everything.
If you get it, then others should get it. If not… well, now it’s time to see what’s wrong. You might have your setting wrong or you might need a separate plugin to get it taken care of. At least you’ll know to take care of the issue.
My final words… this is happening on some of the blogs of those of you who comment here, whose blogs I may have written a comment on. I’m not calling out any names; if you check, you’ll know who you are. lol
