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Signatures in Blog Comments

Posted By Darren Rowse 10th of September 2005 Miscellaneous Blog Tips 0 Comments

Has anyone else noticed recently that a lot of people leaving genuine comments on blogs have also started leaving ‘signature like’ links to their own blogs at the bottom of their comments? (NB: I’m not talking about links within comments that are relevant to the conversation happening in the comment thread).

I’ve noticed it happening more and more on my own blogs but also others. I’m a little torn on how to respond.

On one hand the comments are definitely genuine, on topic and from regular readers – something I love and want to encourage. On the other hand they have an opportunity to leave their link in URL field of the blog and to leave two is doubling up.

I have no follow tags on most of my blogs so doing it has no SEO benefits – but I still find it a bit spammy and have started emailing people who do it – politely asking them to refrain from doing so but I’d be interested to see what others think of it?

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Yeah I’ve started doing it when I leave comments on people’s blogs about Qumana. Give the readers my e-mail address to contact me as well. But that’s the only place I do it.

    T

  2. Personally, I think you’re right on the money by doing so. The link under a persons name in the comment, to me, is like the blog owner saying “thanks for your contribution and sharing your thoughts. I appreciate your input, and here’s a link to your blog in return.”

    Leaving a sig in blog comments is sort of like an annoying insurance salesman handing out a bunch of business cards at his wife’s friends wedding or something. Kinda cheesy.

    Comments like that don’t last long on my blogs, or, if the comment is substantial, I edit out the sig.

    Yes, it seems idealistic, but when the day comes where it becomes an accepted practice (and it probably will) I’ll be turning comments off.

  3. Hi Tris, we must have commented at the same time. Would it not be more appropriate to send the blog owner an email, or refer him/her (and his/her readers) to a post on your own site addressing the issue?

  4. I don’t do it but I can fully understand why it is done.
    Since the name field becomes a link, it doesn’t provide any real description or clue to the owner’s blog [I’ve tried putting “Smart Money Daily” in the name field but it just seems silly] if you put your actual name in there.
    The other reason is that the value of the nofollow tag is highly debatable. Yahoo, for certain, gives SEO juice to links despite the nofollow tag and MSN may as well. So it is a chance to grab a keyword link from a hot site like ProBlogger!

  5. Tris – surely the benefit (such as it is) is already there from the link attached to the poster’s name.

    Why do you think that it’s important to post it a second time?

  6. Darren, I feel this is alright as long as like you said, they leave some comment of value to other readers, but if they just slap and link or bunch of links in the comments section with out contributing then this is just spam.
    Paul

  7. It’s pseudospam. Most site comments include a website link anyway – If you have anything of note to say, people can find you. Most don’t.

  8. Maybe I’m being a bit precious – happy to be told I am.

    I guess I’m just wondering what the benefit would be to do it – don’t most blog readers know that if they want to read more from a commenter that they just click their name?

    I’d also avoid it myself for fear as being seen to be a spammer. The context we’re all blogging in at the moment is one where bloggers are sooo sensitive about comment spam that I’d personally avoid anything that might even resemble it as it has the potential to bring the reputation of your blog down.

    Still interested in others thoughts…

  9. You have quite a substantial following Darren – and for good reason!

    Here’s what I do on my blogs:

    If the comment is clearly spam I delete the entire entry.

    If somebody leaves a comment that is relevant to what is being discussed and they happen to incorporate a link to a recent posting on their own blog that fits with the posting thread – then I leave it up.

    As far as signatures in comments go – I check to see if they are part of my blog swap and if they aren’t I invite them to participate that way instead of cluttering up the comments section with a signature.

    The LAST thing you want to do is alienate a Pro-Blogger fan who brings traffic to your blog via theirs – right?

  10. The only time I ever do this is in LiveJournal or other blogs, where I can’t leave a URL without creating an account, signing in, etc. Otherwise I agree – just use the Website or URL field provided in the comment form.

  11. I don’t know.. I kind of disagree

    I like reading signatures, even if they include web links…

    so long as it isn’t shameless promotion and doesn’t devalue the site then so be it…

  12. Nice process Angela.

    the other thing to factor in is that too many outbound links can actually have a detrimental impact upon your blog’s rank in Search engines….probably not a problem for most of us with small amounts of comments on blogs – but maybe it has an impact….

    maybe I’m clutching at straws and should just let readers do what they want. :-)

  13. You could just turn off html in your comments but, I’d say there are better battles to fight, especially if they’re leaving relevant comments.

  14. If somebody leaves a comment that is relevant to what is being discussed and they happen to incorporate a link to a recent posting on their own blog that fits with the posting thread – then I leave it up.

    I agree with Angela.

  15. Another factor – when people leave signatures with links on some of my blogs my spam detectors pick it up and either delete it automatically or queue it for moderation. This means a lot of such comments just don’t make it to the blog or are very delayed in getting up.

  16. My thought about that is that with the explosive grow that the blogs are having, most of the people are trying to promote their blogs in other blogs.

    In particular I rotate the blogs that I put in the website field on the comments, and as Zero Boss, I live only one link as a signature in the places I have to sign.

  17. LcF – yeah – I agree. links which are relevant to the thread of conversation are totally fine with me. If they add to the discussion I don’t have a problem. Its when they are purely self promotional that I start to get concerned. Comments are not a place to advertise yourself.

  18. I’m probably not going to win this debate, BUT….

    I’m kinda getting tired of bloggers looking for reasons to stop comments, links, sig lines, etc.

    In the offline world, as a salesman for 20 years or so, I’ve had and still have some VERY aggravating customers. They have to be coddled, held by the hand and have their arses kissed. Without the troublesome one’s, I wouldn’t make as nice a living. If all I have are perfect customers, life’s gonna be nice, but I’ll be eating a lot of wish sandwiches.

    Same thing with commenters. If all you want are perfect readers, life will be nice, but you’ll be preachin’ to the choir.

    Now Hear This – This comment was not aimed directly at Darren, he just happened to write this post at about the same time I got fed up with bloggers who don’t want readers, interaction or people available to click on their ads or buy their latest book, course, CD, etc.

    I have something like 96 blogs that I read fairly regularly, so his post was not the first I’ve read. I just figured that the clientele here was mature enough to debate without crying and whining, so I might as well make the analogy here, between customers and commenters.

    How do we know that those who leave sig lines aren’t the very one’s who actually click on ads and but our products ? Maybe the regular readers who are ad blind should be the ones we go after, not the sig-line-commenters. Maybe we should go after the ones who take up bandwidth by reading and never clicking or commenting.

    Is this perfect logic ? No. Just playing “dummies” advocate. Your turn.

    I’d love to have comments or even readers on any of our 11 blogs.

    Maybe it’s just commenter envy coming out ;-)

    Be gentle with me, I’m sensitive.

  19. I actually like signatures for the most part. And yeah, I know you can click on the persons name, but sometimes signatures catch my attention. Like everything, they can be overdone. But for the most part, it adds a little more personality to the comments. But maybe that’s just me.

  20. Nice comment Mike – I’m enjoying seeing the variety of opinion here. You make some interesting points.

  21. A signature to me is no problem. Although, I had someone trying to leave his entire paragraph bio after each comment. That is totally unacceptable and was deleted. Blog owner rules should, well, rule.

  22. Thanks for not crushing me, Blog Master.

    I really do enjoy the community of commenters here, Darren. You are to be commended for developing such a diverse, mature and worldly group. The commenters here are willing to let opinions be voiced and then treat those that differ with respect. That’s not the case on 95% of the blogs I read. In fact, I don’t bother sharing with the community, until I figure out whether or not they are able to handle criticism, differing opinions and truth/facts.

    As Christopher said, sure I can click on their name, but I seldom do, as I have way too many places to go, as it is.

    Oh, and BTW – You sounded funny on the call with Andy. You got an accent or something ? Where the heck did you learn to talk like that ?

    ( And that comes from a Kentuckian who sounds like Ernest T. Bass. )

  23. Funny accent hey…. ooh the comments I could make :-)

    You gotta hang out with more Aussies mate :-)

  24. I’ve never had to deal with this on my own blogs yet, but I must say I’m a ltitle torn on the issue. On the one hand, just a name and a URL as signature would probably be fine with me, albeit a little redundant due to the “website” field commenters already have the opportunity to fill in. On the other hand, it could quickly degenerate and fall into the same pits as forum signatures: after all, even if it’s not as convenient as an automated sig, what prevents a person who really wants to advertise her blog from preparing, say, a sig with a long description or even a banner, then copy & pasting the code at the bottom of each of her comments? Now this would be spammy and obnoxious. (I know, I’m probably a little paranoid on this example, but really, I wouldn’t be surprised.)

  25. I am absolutely 100% okay with sigs in comments provided they’re not spamming and unless there’s some valid technical reason (such as it affecting search rankings).

    Sure it might be a bit cheeky of the poster, but what is he/she trying to do? Give notice to their own blog. What is so wrong with that? Sure they’re “doubling up” but isn’t that just clever marketing?

    What cheeky tricks do we ALL use to get people to click on our AdSense links? Hmm? Color them to match our websites so they are almost disguised as genuine links… Placing them in “hot spots”…

    Sorry but on this one, I gotta say the pot is calling the kettle black.

  26. True ChrisH – but the difference in tweaking Adsense ads and leaving two links instead of one on comments is that you can do what you like on your own blog in terms of Adsense – but leaving irrelevant doubling up links on another person’s webspace is probably another matter.

  27. What do you think about adding a general FAQ page somewhere noticeable with some regulations and tips for submitting comments?

  28. If you click on my name HART, you go to my website .. but it might be any one of my five blog URLs, depending on the mood I feel or the blog post I am responding to. If you do a search for me on technorati.com … by my domain “1800HART.com” – you don’t see any of the posts that I have made in this blog or any other blog unless I added it as a signature or it was mentioned in the post or comment. If you search for “HART” you do see my comments – the only thing is that there are 94,167 other instances of HART to sift through to find these comments I made on problogger.net.

    That means I’m okay with sig’s too! I can delete 12 lines (1 post) just as easily as I can for 10 lines – if warranted……..// HART

  29. I recently removed the nofollow tags from my wordpress blog so comments made pass on pagerank after reading a post from another blogger that also referenced this – http://www.nonofollow.net/index.php?title=Main_Page. In a nutshell I think provided the owner of a blog keeps on eye for obvious comment spam and the the blog system provides some reasonable moderation tools to prevent spam from going live then I have no problem exchanging comments for link credit.

    I wish all bloggers would remove the nofollow tag. The beauty of the blogosphere is that bloggers help each other by linking back and forth and provided abusers are moderated away we can all work to help each other grow our blogs.

  30. I like the links in sigs too. Shoot, I’ve probably done this here (I know I do it elsewhere), though never a para LOL

    Darren, I used to worry about outbound links, but just a week or so ago I read one of your posts that gave me the impression you didn’t worry about that because it all would work out in the end (ie a good blog has lots of incoming and lots of outgoing)

  31. True Arthomemama – I guess since writing that I’ve had a couple of people suggest that they’ve seen a little evidence of decreases in page rank on their blogs as a result of too many outbound links. It’s all speculation really and doesn’t worry me in the scheme of things.

  32. Like The Zero Boss I tend only to leave such sigs where comment systems don’t allow them in any other way.

    Also whenever I *do* leave a sig link, it’s always plaintext only – no actual A tag – not only does it offend less, it’s more reliable.


    Ben Helps (http://www.droplet.com.au/~zensei)
    …who doesn’t normally leave a sig on Problogger comments but just wanted to make a point.

  33. I’ve never bothered adding rel=”nofollow” attributes to links in comments on 456 Berea Street. I use very tight spam filtering instead, and remove any spammy comments that slip through. Sometimes it’s a bit difficult where to draw the line though.

    I haven’t had a lot of comments with signatures (yet). When someone does leave a signature in a comment I’ll take an extra look at any links in it.

    If the comment is legitimate but the links are spammy, I just remove the links. If it’s a “me too” comment on an old post or completely irrelevant to the subject of the post, AND the signature (or comment) contains “spammy” links, I usually delete the comment and blacklist the URLs.

    If the comment is legitimate and relevant, and no links in the signature are spammy, I’ll probably leave it. Signatures do look a bit annoying in comments, but like others have said it’s clever marketing.

  34. Clearly spam should be removed, but I think if someone adds a signature this may well work better for other readers of the comments. It’s a usability thing. I wouldn’t put only one link to an action page on say a home page since different visitors have different ways of looking at things. Some blogs have pretty cryptic ways of showing the blog reference of the commenter.

    So I personally go along with the wishes of my ‘host’, but I think hosts should realize that other visitors may appreciate signatures.

  35. you should remove ref=nofollow from comment links. people who comment spent their time and effort to comment, so it is unfair. I removed ref=nofollow from comments in my blogs.

  36. Its not something I have done, but the main reason for doing it is search engine optimisation – linking with one’s name is no where near as powerful as linking with your key words of choice.
    Sometimes I have put my Name as ‘Lea from xxxxx’, where the xxxxx is the (brief) description of the site I am linking to in order to get those keywords in, but I hate it, it looks so dorky.
    Putting a proper sig on the bottom of the comment would give your poster a more powerful link – and it gives your readers a better idea of what site I am from, should they want to see what I am all about.

  37. Drives my nutty. Do they not see the big NAME, MAIL and WEBSITE field? I usually edit out signatures from comments for this reason – I find it disrupts the conversational ‘read’ of a post’s comments.

  38. I would have no problem with people adding signatures to their posts if their comment had some signifcant depth to it. Writing two sentences that say, yes I agree and then 3 lines of signature strikes me as spamming.

    On the other hand a 4 paragraph essay has earned a few lines of self promotion at the end I think. ;)

    This is a battle that’s been fought in forums for years and there never seems to have been a real standard. Personally even when I use a signature (email and forums usually) I try to keep it to a 3 line max. I hate signatures that are longer than the post itself.

  39. I personally don’t see the big deal. Sometimes people have 2 or more websites to show off and they put it in a sig. You no follow tags on, so everybody know that they don’t benifit from this from the SEs. It’s simply for the other users.

    As a reader I find that the website name and/or URL intriguing sometimes. I’m going to go about hovering over everybody’s name just to see what their site is about. And like Brad said, for me (at least at first) it was not obvious that the name was the link.

    Again, everything in moderation right? 3+ lines does seem excessive. But I don’t see the big deal with 1 or 2 lines with a short description and a URL.

    Again, I’m taking a page out of Brad’s Book:

    http://www.deletemyspam.com – basically on spam related issues. And yes, I will be doing an article about this.

  40. I don’t include a signature but I have started to sometimes put “Stuart Bruce, PR Consultant” in the name field. Darren says “don’t most blog readers know that if they want to read more from a commenter that they just click their name?”. I think you’d be surprised how few do.

    And that is one of the best things about blogs at the moment, they are becoming more mainstream and we’ve got to start making things easier for people. We’re all very short of time and a sig is a benefit to me as a reader, it gives me an extra clue as to if it is worth following the link.

    If the comment is relevant and adds to the post then a sig is fine. It is a good example of how blogs are becoming more useful.

    The test should be does is benefit your readers, don’t get precious about what it does for either you or the commenter.

  41. it doesn’t bother me but it really bothers my regular readers. they always jump up to my defense and call out anyone who promotes their site in my comments. it’s kind of cool, actually.

  42. I don’t have a problem with sigs, as long as, as everyone agrees, the comment is for real. In fact, I find it surprising you have an issue, Darren. I mean if you were a personal blogger, I might understand this concern for pure and promotion-free commenting. But you host a business blog, full of ads and self-promotional posts and links. It’s a very uni-directonal attitude.

    Plus I was going to say exactly what Brad already said here:
    “And sorry, it is NOT clear, or even intuitive to everyone that the poster’s name is a link back to their site. To the blogsphere majority maybe, but that’s a small percentage of the entire internet, especially if you get a lot of newbie SE traffic.”

  43. […] Here’s an interesting post—wielding quite an amount of questions— that I picked on Darren’s blog: signatures in blog comments. […]

  44. This “rel=nofollow” was complete news to me, and I see it on all my blogs. I’m actually disappointed that it’s defaulting this way and hidden in the wordpress templates instead of an option. I have to read up on this.

  45. Is it safe to come out now? Darren’s anti-spam program hates me anyway so I wouldn’t dare leave a signature on the end of a comment. As it is, the only way I can open my mouth here is to put my pointer blogspot (spit) blog in the website field. But it does lead to problems when I have a legitimate and relevant post to point to regarding something that Darren posts – as in the recent series on better blogging. I know if I put the link in the comment, the anti-spam will pounce on it – so what do I do?

  46. Brad – thanks for your comment. I am sorry this rubbed you up the wrong way. It’s not my intention to anger people – rather my intention was to start a discussion to see what people think on this issue. As I said in my initial post I feel torn by this.

    As far as I can tell – signatures in comments is a pretty new development, I’ve only started getting them in the last month or two and so as a new phenomenum I thought it’d be good to have a discussion on them.

    As a result of the discussion I’m starting to see that perhaps I’ve been wrong in my opinion on signatures in comments. I’m still not won over – but I can see some arguements for why they might be legitimate.

    However I’m not convinced completely and am still uncomfortable with them for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is that I wonder where this will all end up? Comment Signatures are a pretty new thing as far as I can tell – or at least they are only just starting to be more widely used. My concern is that if they continue to be used that we’ll begin to see more and more elaborate signatures that actually have the potential to take something away from the blog posts that they appear on. We’ve probably all see discussion forums where participants have used all kinds of ugly tactics to highlight their signatures including colours, pictures, >>>>>>>##### FORMATTING######Do you consider tasteful text signatures in forums to be spam too?? – I don’t have a problem with this in forums if the forum participants add their signature in accordance with the rules for doing so. Forums have an inbuilt method for leaving signatures and if people use this then that’s fine. Blogs are a different medium and perhaps its not good to compare them – but if we do they too have an in built method for leaving a URL which I always thought was the acceptable way of highlighting your own blog.
    Do you consider signatures at the end of free articles spam? – No – again it’s a different medium and again signatures at the end of free articles are a widely acceptable thing – the difference between them and blog comment signatures is that the blogger using the free article has control over whether they post the article and thereby the link where as in comments they don’t.
    When someone replies to your email and has a sig file, is that Spam?? – Of course not. This is probably the point you make which is closest to blog comments and is most convincing to me – however my main reaction is that the difference is that a blog is someone else’s property. If they’ve given you a way to leave a link and then you take things one step further and leave another is this overstepping the mark? My approach to leaving comments on blogs is that I’m visiting someone else’s property and that I need to be a good guest. This means using their blog in the way its designed to be used – if I don’t I run the risk of angering them and ending a potential blog buddy friendship.

    As I say above – I’m moving in my position on comment signatures but I remain unconvinced to this point. I’m enjoying the discussion and am open to being moved further by someone who has a great argument as to why comment signatures are a necessary and should be allowed on blogs.

  47. I usually remove signature links in comments on my blogs. After all, that’s why there is a field for someone to put in their URL.

    I agree with some of the others about the nofollow tag. It does absolutely nothing to stop spam and it hurts legitimate commenters. Still don’t understand why it’s turned on by default in WP, but I guess that’s why we have plugins.

  48. Hi all, it’s me again. Here’s something no one seems to have mentioned yet: I own about a dozen blogs and just spent the past 40 minutes or so moderating out a rash of autosubmitted comments, all of which appear to be coming from actual people.

    These comments are a sentence or two long and contain one or two urls and links at the end, just like if they were sigs.

    If this keeps up like it’s been for the last 2-3 days I will have to set my automatic comment moderation a little higher to automatically blackhole any comments containing links within the body of the actual comment itself, which means comments containing sigs will go too.

    Now, here’s something I’ve said before and will say again: If you are genuinely interested in a blog enough to comment and contribute to the conversation you are welcome to do so on my blogs with open arms. If you don’t comment because you’re not getting the promotion, other than what’s provided in the comment form where you’re url and name is linked, don’t comment at all.

    Want to advertise on my blogs? You can buy an ad.

    Got something to contribute? Your contribution is welcome and you get the free link.

  49. Linking is what makes the web. So what if someone is trying to get traffic? If you have a good website, with good content, what you are concerned about?

  50. I’ll add some more fuel to the fire.

    If it’s a commercial blog, it’s the same as the business I work in offline.

    If you’re gonna sell a product, advertising or a service, you’re gonna have to deal with ” dog ” customer’s, as we call them.

    My friend Paul say’s he just spent 40 minutes getting rid of ” dog ” tracks, well, I spend more than that EVERY day, not once in a while, EVERY day, on ” dogs “. It’s part of the ” cost of doing business “.

    Would I be more productive without them ? Absolutely. Can I rid the world of them ? Absolutely not. So I deal with them as best I can and try to learn a lesson or two, when I can.

    You can set your defenses to cull as many ” customers ” as you want, but if you do it to the point of running away ALL of them, or even MOST of them, it won’t really matter how ” clean ” your blog is.

    I fight every day with my customer service reps and those that answer the phones, reminding them that without those people on the other end, we have no reason to come to the office.

    I don’t want to deal with this either, but it’s simply part of being a business versus being an hourly employee.

    Can you still make a living, while culling out the ” dogs ” ? I hope so, because it seems that this will be the next problematic part of allowing comments.

    Comments are people, too. Remember that. Think about it. People. The kind of people who buy, click, subscribe, etc.

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