To Nuke, or Not To Nuke?
I hate spam. You probably know that about me. Now I'm in a dilemma.
In a recent post I mentioned Zillow.com, which gives estimates of housing prices of your house and your neighbors. Today, a competitor left a comment there with a link to their own site. Should I delete it?
In the past, my comment spam has taken the form of comments that are unrelated to the post being commented on. The spammer is just trying to take advantage of my site to promote their own. I delete those out of hand.
In this case, however, the comment is relevant to the post. I want to delete it anyway. It's impersonal. It looks like boilerplate. Worst of all, their site seems inferior. It has no data for my area, and it's not as nicely designed as Zillow.
The comment is from a web site. It's not signed with anyone's name. It's not a regular reader of this blog. They probably just Googled for blogs mentioning Zillow, and then added a comment linking to their own site. Is this spam? Or legitimate?
What do you think?
Blog Tag: Chatter
6 Comments:
I've struggled with this one before, and I figure that if they only responded to that one entry, didn't do other spamming, then I'd leave it. Maybe with a link back to this entry, or some other additional comment about why you prefer one over the other...
I have deleted manually such comments. So I'd say, nuke it ;)
Let me tell you about my "nuke" product....
No, seriously. I mentioned in one of my own posts that light-at-night slippers would be a cool Mother's or Father's Day present. So, I've gotten someone doing the same thing in the comments to that post.
If it doesn't appear to have a thinking human brain behind it (to the extent of "I read your post on Zillow, and just wanted to make others aware of Acme Corp..."), I would favor the nuclear option (which is exactly what I did for those comments on my post).
In this case, the identity of the comment would make the decision an easy process for me.
Comments on a blog are intended for users to interact with other users not for websites.com to advertise their goods.
What appears as a comment on your blog, Dave, is quite simply a blatant advertisement.
Nuke the b*stard!
Nuke it, dude!
The tribe has spoken. It's history! :)
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