Evil Akismet
I know I don’t post here half as often as I should and this isn’t really the point of the blog but Im gonna have a little rant about something here. As you mayknow I have my finger in a few different SEO pies and have relationships with a lot of programmers so I get to test a lot of public betas and private software. I use a lot of these tools as they were intended and let the creators know how I got on, I also use some of the tools a lot after testing period is over.
One of the tools I use regularly is the free blog comment tool I love the tool as it makes finding relevant blogs to link from as easy as pie (thats a lot of pies already, maybe Im hungry……). Its a great tool and does what it says on the tin, however I recently went to get some comments from a site I have done no blog commenting on, no outsourcing or any link building services that did any blog commenting.
The first comment I had gave me a blank white screen, akismet’s major footprint. I thought ah maybe my IP is banned, reset router, new IP, resubmitted…. no dice. So I changed up anchor text to be a very common name, changed IP, changed useragent changed comment….. no dice… still blank screen.
Now I tried changing everything and I was still getting the usual reply from Akismet “Fuck off spambot” but I am no spam bot. I don’t even like spamming, it annoys the hell out me receiving so I limit the amount I do myself. I want to reiterate I have never spammed this domain, it has no history from before I bought it, all my comments were perfectly legit, on topic hand written comments that have never been near spam.
Basically what has happened here is a blogger like myself has seen the anchor text and website and thought nope your a link builder so Im not going to allow your legit comment, hit the spam button and got my whole domain banned. Obviously lots of people use Akismet not realising they literally have the power of the blogosphere at their fingertips.
The worrying thing about all of this is that it shows quite clearly that literally just a couple of bloggers can get a whole domain banned by akismet, this will seriously limit the number of links that site is ever able to generate and in turn limit its potential rankings, not to mention the amount of time and money wasted in trying to build links using this plugin.
To summarize I like what Akismet tried to do but they have become a law unto themselves and are fucking some of us in the ass. Don’t forget this. I for one am going to contact them to remove domain bans right away as it is too easy to impact competitors with such minimal effort.
