How do I know if I have been blacklisted by Akismet?

[markowe]

I try to provide thoughtful, non-spammy comments on blogs that interest me, and promote my site/s in doing so.

But I have noticed lately that when I submit a comment to almost any Wordpress blog I just get a blank screen, or the page refreshes with no notification of 'Your comment is awaiting moderation'.

Is that an indication of Akismet 'swallowing' my comments?

I have never spammed blogs, like I say, but maybe it's enough for one or two bloggers to put me in the spam bin and for my IP and/or site to get blacklisted?

[RealEcon]

Yeah man the blank screen is the akismet ban. If you want to keep commenting on akismet blogs you need to go buy a $2.00 .info domain and 301 redirect it to your money site as the .info will not be banned and will pass most of the link juice to your money site.

Dont even bother trying to get your money site unbanned, your competitors will just run your money site through scrapebox and you will be banned again in no time;-)

[markowe]

Originally Posted by RealEcon

Yeah man the blank screen is the akismet ban. If you want to keep commenting on akismet blogs you need to go buy a $2.00 .info domain and 301 redirect it to your money site as the .info will not be banned and will pass most of the link juice to your money site.

Dont even bother trying to get your money site unbanned, your competitors will just run your money site through scrapebox and you will be banned again in no time;-)

Thanks, feared as much! The voice of experience

I guess that's the problem with commenting on blogs in the same niche, if they see you as a competitor they can slap you easily. I never thought of that . Kind of a hassle redirecting an .info just for that, maybe I'll just go look for auto-approve blogs

[jt66250]

Yeah.. 301 redirect and then run the risk of getting sandboxed by Google for trying to fool the search engine....

Backlinking is not for the squeamish.. you gotta have thick skin and prepare to be disappointed sometimes..

As long as you don't abuse the tools that are out there you can be successful

[Craig Paulson]

Originally Posted by jt66250

Yeah.. 301 redirect and then run the risk of getting sandboxed by Google for trying to fool the search engine....

Backlinking is not for the squeamish.. you gotta have thick skin and prepare to be disappointed sometimes..

As long as you don't abuse the tools that are out there you can be successful

I doubt Google will ban a domain just because you 301 it. Just about every site at some point uses 301's because of sitemap changes, new sites are put up, etc. There's all sorts of reasons for using them. That's why they exist. The only question is whether 100% of the link juice gets passed through a 301. No one knows for sure (except Google), but I would suspect that most, if not all of it is since a 301 is simply telling the search engines that a page has been permanently moved from point A to point B. You're not trying to fool anybody, you're just giving them directions to your new "home".

[verdecove]

Originally Posted by markowe

I try to provide thoughtful, non-spammy comments on blogs that interest me, and promote my site/s in doing so.

But I have noticed lately that when I submit a comment to almost any Wordpress blog I just get a blank screen, or the page refreshes with no notification of 'Your comment is awaiting moderation'.

Is that an indication of Akismet 'swallowing' my comments?

I have never spammed blogs, like I say, but maybe it's enough for one or two bloggers to put me in the spam bin and for my IP and/or site to get blacklisted?

Sounds like we are sitting in the same boat and I'm sure we are not the only ones. do a little research on the web and you will find tons of complaints about how Akismet works and why lots of bloggers even get rid of it. Akismet has become too controlling and actually can hurt a blog.
Akismet might be a great tool to control spam but can also be a great weapon, used against competitors. Obviously it does not take much at all to get blacklisted.
It's really weird that not one of our blog comments on Typade, Blogspot or whatever other blog platform and no matter if manually confirmed or per spam control watched, has gotten disapproved or marked as spam.
It only happens on Wordpress based blogs with Akismet installed.
We have contacted Akismet and asked to remove us from their blacklist.
Akismet tried to assure us, there is no Blacklist and the owner of the blogs configure Akismet Spam blocker as per their own wishes and some of our comments would sound like spam.
BS!..and that's exactly what I responded on their email:
Please do not try to tell us, Akismet spam blocker is not blocking by IP and only catching spam as configured by the blog owners.
We all in a sudden got blocked even on blogs we had a very good and long term relationship with, even on blogs from friends and even...now please listen!!!...on blogs from our own relatives and now please listen again!!! even on our own created blog!!!
It doesn't matter if we submitted another name, email or url or no url at. Neither it seemed to matter whatever the content of the post or the content of the comment was about, the comments got caught straight as spam. So you don't need to tell us, you do not have a Blacklist based on IP's. Adding our names, email and url to any blog whitelists did not work either.
Also, since you are telling us, some of our comments do sound like spam, please send us examples of our comments that sounded like spam to you!

No Further Response From Akismet On This Subject To This Day! (email was sent about 2 months ago)

By right, I even would think, what Akismet is doing or causing could also be called doing damage to a business. Blog commenting might not be that relevant for the SERP's anymore but is still a good way to draw traffic and even more important, to build relationships with (future) customers. That's one reason why we never ever left one single comment on a blog that could be understood as spam by the blog owner and why all our comments are submitted manually.
It really hurts being limited commenting on certain blog platforms only since Wordpress is still very popular and a lot of blogs in our niche are Wordpress based blogs.
So far I haven't found any work around for this problem that Akismet causes us yet.
If anybody here has a solution how to work around Akismet, I would really appreciate any input.

Thank You and sorry for the long rant (I'm really pissed off by Akismet)
verdecove

[JSProjects]

Originally Posted by markowe

Thanks, feared as much! The voice of experience

I guess that's the problem with commenting on blogs in the same niche, if they see you as a competitor they can slap you easily. I never thought of that . Kind of a hassle redirecting an .info just for that, maybe I'll just go look for auto-approve blogs

I would suggest using the 301 redirect instead of auto approve blogs. That is, unless you can find some high quality auto approve blogs. (Ones that are at least somewhat moderated.) Otherwise you run the risk of sharing link juice with spammy / shady sites.

[Cosmit]

Akismet has been long removed from my blogs as our relationship ended after I got blacklisted for no reason & no response to my emails. A simple captcha plugin does the trick.

Although Akismet's theory is great, in practice, as mentioned, competitors will take advantage of it.

[verdecove]

Originally Posted by Cosmit

Akismet has been long removed from my blogs as our relationship ended after I got blacklisted for no reason & no response to my emails. A simple captcha plugin does the trick.

Although Akismet's theory is great, in practice, as mentioned, competitors will take advantage of it.

I never installed Akismet on my blog. The captcha works fine for me too.
I figured Akismet would cause more problems than being helpful. Like I said before, Akismmet could be a great plugin but it is taking over too much of control and works with the force of a tornado.
It's not just hurting the people who actually leave good and meaningful comments by blocking them, it's hurting the blog itself too. Blogs live from comments, not the spam comments - the quality comments and blogs might loose a lot of good comments due to they just get marked as spam. A blog that gets a decent amount of traffic and comments will also see a fair amount of spam (unfortunately) and not every blog owner does what they should do, to take their time and read the comments, even the ones caught by Akismet and then to sort the good from the bad.
I know some blog owners they got rid of Akismet like you did and I know they had their reasons. It's just a shame that Akismet itself doesn't see what's going wrong on their end and their customer service is anything else but friendly and helpful. Well, in the long run they will hurt themselves (I hope).