Andy Beard wrote a good post about his warning signs for comment spammers which is quite topical for us as over the weekend somebody must have hit the spam button on one of our one-liners, that we obviously thought was funny, and he / she obviously did not. ..whoops.

…But you know, to be honest, even if we were going to be mindlessly spamming blogs, we wouldnt be doing it with our own business email address nor linking to our business website.

Funnily enough, probably sometime slightly before that happened we had left a comment on Andy’s blog, and which judging by his own self admitted “harsh moderation regime”, could have triggered his alarm bells too.

Thankfully it did not, and Andy being the good egg he obviously is, published it, because after all it was a genuine comment from us on a really interesting point we had not thought about before. Dofollow or not, old post or not, I would have commented there because I learnt something and was grateful for that.

To me it would be a sad state of affairs when you have something genuine to say but are afraid to do so in case you get spammed off to Akismet. We contacted them and they were pretty good about it, and sorted the “spam tag” out and advised us to “be more careful where you post..” lol, ..not wrong.

Anyway, manual spam comments is a problem we’re yet to have on here, although we are ardent supporters of dofollow and this is a dofollow blog, we only seem to be attracting the automatic type of spam at present.

We welcome (genuine) comments, and do probably expect the tinned luncheon meat brigade will be a bit more interested now that the surging power of our site and blog is at least partially reflected in the little green toolbar

Just shortly after that though whilst looking around for informtion on the subject we came across this post by Optempo.com ..so, absolutely on topic, we left a detailed comment regarding our newly found Akismet spammer status, as an experiment really, to see if it would get through.

As yet it hasnt, or maybe they just didn’t like our writing style, who knows?

Anyway no harm done anyway as it was during spam lockdown and as the email address was later vilified of “all wrong doing Your Honour”

But if you want to be sure that your good reputation is not to be smeared in the bad smelling stuff, you should have a read of Andy’s warning signs and if you should find yourself in this scenario, stop commenting immediately, as they will go straight in spam, and if people dont check or cant be bothered to rescue you, youre only making things worse.

A good read of Andy’s list of what is expected behaviour wise on his blog, and while youre at it Onreact / SEO2.0 Blog commenting netiquette wouldnt hurt, as Tad’s blog is also class, and these rulesets should go a way towards helping newbies (and even the more experienced of us too ) avoid Akismet’s trigger-happy pink meaty traphole.