Talk about a storm in a coffee pot. Silly fellow, John Chow dot com mogul, has decided he is going to nickel and dime some of his readers with a $10 a month comments oriented scheme. He is offering commenters a backlink to his site via a Do Follow applied to any comments they leave on his site. Woo hoo say some, boo say I, wtf is a Do Follow, say many.

What's a Do Follow, dude?

By default, Wordpress and many other commenting systems tell Google not to make a big deal of the links that commenters create with their names when they leave a comment ie the in-built coding says, Google, No Follow Ed, man! On the other hand, Do Follow unleashes the beast and advises Google to do something constructive with the link.

Woo hoo is what you hear from the bloggers who think it is cool to get a link to a PR6 site just for leaving a comment plus $10 in John Chow's piggy bank. And for his part, John Chow is probably thinking $10 x a large proportion of 5000 subscribers hmmmmm. $$$$$$$$. I say boo, though, along with a few others, and here is why.

Do Follow craps on content

I don't have a crystal ball, but if I, or you, were to advertise, "For $10 a month, post comments all over this high PR site and get a backlink every time." what would happen? Most likely scenario is, instantly a certain pool of not quite tech savvy people would go mad and trawl through my every old post leaving remarks like, "Cool, nice blog, I agree, You're a twat etc etc."

There are a couple of quick points worth making, methinks!! Content is king, and bulk commenting schemes produce crap content. Readers, as well as Google will read crap comments and make up their own mind about the quality. Net result for all concerned in the long term - not good!! The long story follows:

Look at Do Follow from a Google standpoint

While the demented ones are wasting their lives commenting inanely in the hope of getting loads of link love, it is highly debatable that Google would think very highly of their comments.

Certainly a Do Follow link is going to be better (in theory) than a No Follow link , so the $10 deal appears to have a positive side, but...

But, indeed! As far as Google is concerned, compared to links in the body of a real post, these comment-based links hold marginal value from the outset. Worse than that, from a Google perspective at least, the more comments-based links (or any links for that matter) populating a page, the less value each link has. The $10 link love scheme encourages lots of people to leave lots of links, so you know the dilution process on any page is going to be major.

It also gets worse. The idea that you have a link on John Chow's homepage because you paid $10 and commented on a front page article, is false - as far as Google is concerned. Within a couple of days, the article drops off the homepage, and it loses its homepage PR. It is how it works. That article fights for its own popularity level as a standalone page. The post's new PR will invariably be less popular than the homepage that attracted you to the DoFollow offer. In the blink of a $10 transaction, your link love payback on the back of a comment binge will be majorly diluted.

Google logic, therefore, says your return on $10 a month "investment" has almost no lasting value, and the more pointless link-grabbing comments you leave, the worse it gets.

Look at Do Follow from a site owner's standpoint

To be honest, $10 x a few thousand sounds nice, but I don't think that the return is worthwhile compensation for the repercussions of a drop in the entertainment value of a site built with long term gain in mind.

If you assume that comments are a part and parcel of the overall content of the site, you want to encourage the highest quality comments to keep rolling in. Some of the best remarks made on the Pisstakers are to be found in the comments section, so I wouldn't want to dilute their quality. But, if I gave a green light to you to spam the comments section, that part of the site would turn to rat's poo and I would expect a few readers to start complaining, "Hey Ed, your comments (ie an important part of your content) are shit, we arent commenting any more and certainly aren't reading them either." This isn't a great scenario!

Most blogs depend on a relationship, a sense of community and discussion. This is where comments play a major role in the success of a blog. John Chow is expecting advantages from a proliferation of crap content? If that is a good strategy, please don't show me a bad one, buddy. Or maybe it is all a pisstaker post ?

John Chow is expanding on a bad idea of his!

It could be argued that my pessimistic Do Follow for cash forecast is based purely on what I think would happen if I applied this Do Follow policy on my 200 uniques a day site. On that basis, sure, mine is not necessarily an accurate forecast of the scenario on John Chow's 4000 uniques a day site. I say otherwise, because the evidence I based my assumption on is from what I see on John Chow's own site. This Do Follow deal of his is based on an idea he already has in place, and it ain't that great at all!

His current Do Follow plan

To be fair, his comments section is generally vibrant and the quality of many commenters is quite good, but that is only half the story! His comments boxes are already peppered with crap, thanks to a scheme that encourages commenters to strive for Top 10 Commenter status each month. ie If you leave loads of comments, you will get one of these same Do Follow links that I am talking about now with the $10 scheme. People are leaving 100 comments a month. Feel the quality - not!

Can a variation on this comments-based theme (times 10) really improve the quality of comments / the quality of his site content / the chance of attracting more readers? I think not.

John Chow may well retract his latest experiment as another bad, sorry, "evil" idea and will carry on as before. But he may not, and certainly lots of bloggers will be tempted to give him $10 just to see what happens.

Fans of his may say I am missing the point and it is all about the numbers game ie he is evil, always pushing the envelope and the figures show his earnings are constantly rising, regardless of experiments. Maybe, but he hasn't tried charging like this before!

But maybe John Chow thinks that with such a big readership in place, eating his every word, he can get away with subtly worsening the content? Good luck trying to mask the mass of crap coming his way. The skewed mix of sponsored posts and real content is already attracting adverse comments, but hey, income is up so who cares!!

Do Follow or No Follow, that is the final question

To reiterate, the evidence isn't great if you expect appealing comments (ie more new reader bait) to rise from incentives to mass comment.

As a blog owner offering the Do Follow service correctly, ie as part of your friendly helping hand to people who contribute a realistic number of meaningful comments to your site, go for it. It is a good use of the tool.

As a blog owner offering this type of inverted cash for comments strategy to readers, I would reflect and quickly draft a backtrack post - sorry this was a bad experiment , we are stopping it / radically over-hauling it now. Of course I could be a greedy short termist dummy, take the $10 now and pray I can blag my way out of it once I have earned a few bucks.

And finally, as a site visitor contemplating handing over $10 to spam comments boxes galore, I suggest you act like a wise fellow and do not follow the DO Follow for $10 scheme. Put your $10 away and spend 5 minutes answering my Blog Interrogation - an easier and far more constructive way to create content and gain some readership. Or write a post on your own site that others find worth linking to. Anything but inane comments on someone else's site. Proper content is king!

And thanks to Phishie for alerting me to this original story. His is almost the sole external link on this page so far. Almost pure link love, man.