This way of dealing with comment URL spam is more efficient. Our comment approval process was starting to be too costly. To get an idea about how such a process, once out of your own hands, can become too cumbersome, write down specific, detailed instructions for someone else on how to decide which URL’s to let through or not.

Surprisingly, moderating CommentLuv is much easier; the over-optimized spam titles stand out right away :)

Yes, since the redesign we strip out URL’s *but* we have CommentLuv in place. Will look into how we can remove that URL field from the comment form.

Thanks for pointing it out, Tad :)

The net result is that Google still follows and gives link juice for nofollow backlinks, although they apportion a lesser value.

Google would be better off trying to incorporate some intelligence to giving different juice depending on the type of backlink.

Otherwise, forum profile spamming and the like will continue to pervade the mainstream of SEO and other marketers. Sad but true.

Chris

graywolf: The conversation takes place elsewhere or not at all. You may be lucky and get the links but I gues in most cases you won’t get neither the link nor the comment. For instance in my case I’ve completely forgotten waht I wanted to add as a comment to that post.
Also comments are great for ranking of older posts. Thanks to fresh comments I rank for years old postings.

Thanks for the replies guys – good to see it’s either useful to know or in Graywolf’s case there’s a very good reason for it and it’s actually working to his advantage.