Thursday, August 07, 2008

Dear Readers - what should I do with this comment?

Dear Readers. I need your advice. A commentator under the tag "Conny Vige" has tracked down almost every post I have written about or including Expedia and posted this
"Hi. You have created an interesting and informative blog. I have heard and read about Expedia a lot. It is a great travel experience. You can easily plan your vacation sitting at home or at the office. You can never be sure 100% that everything will go right. I browsed this great site www.pissedconsumer.com and found the customers’ feedbacks on the company. Interested?"
I can't decide whether or not to delete them or let them stay. The argument for keeping them is that they are not offensive and are contextual (ie are in Expedia posts). The argument for ditching is that they are repetitive and might be link hunting for "pissed consumer". The ultimate test of course is whether or not they are spam. I have committed to keep all comments on the site that are not defamatory, spam, nonsensical or full of vitriol/personal insult. So - what do you think. Keep or ditch?

UPDATE - the BOOT readership has spoken. Will be deleted the comments (and any further) but will keep this post up to highlight the comment once.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ditch. It's nothing more than linkbuilding spam. What does it really contribute to any of the conversations?

Anonymous said...

Tim,

It's not the same URL, but whenever I post about Expedia this guy comes on and leaves a comment about his bad experiences with the OTA and leaves a link to his site.

I let him off the first time, but since I have dumped his comment in my spam bin.

I think they're probably using Google Alerts to find out who is blogging about Expedia.

Anonymous said...

Ditch.
Spam by my definition.

Anonymous said...

Kevin on Travolution has posted back to this one and request he/she stop spamming his blog.

I suggest you do likewise. There's no place for these lame attempts at gaming the system. Who do they think we are that we would tolerate it.

Stephen A. Joyce said...

I had the same problem with someone who obviously had a problem with Steve Kaufner from Tripadvisor. They kept leaving comments that linked to a blog that was quite defamatory of Mr. Kaufner. I say ditch the comments. If they want to vent, they can do so in a reasonable manner and in an appropriate forum.

Anonymous said...

Ditch.

Anonymous said...

Ditch. But keep this post so that they've had their say once..

Anonymous said...

Ditch!

Definitely link building spam. Comment would be appropriate to a post about Expedia's service, but not relevant to every post.

Clearly they are just trying to bulid traffic. It's interesting that you can get back to the Official expedia site, and flight centre, and other OTAs through the sponsored links at the top!

Anonymous said...

Ditch. Classified as spam.

Travolution Blogger said...

"Conny" and her counterpart "John"/"Jon" have been spamming the Travo Blog for the past year. Delete it. It's linkbuilding rubbish and irrelevant to your conversation.

Tim Hughes said...

thanks to all for the wizdom of the crowd. Will keep this post and delete the comments.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Michael Madison said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael Madison said...

I would leave the post with reference to the site but remove actual link.

Tim Hughes said...

i love how Faisal the spammer targeted a spam comment on this post

Anonymous said...

Tim,

I'd suggest you implement a rel="nofollow" policy for all outbound links, and state this clearly.

For example, Wikipedia does this to discourage spammers from link builders.

Perhaps you know about this already. Google wont follow the link and therefore there is no link building value.

Steve