Guest Post By Michel Fortin
I’ve done a couple of things to my blog, mostly “behind the scenes,” that I
want to share with you.
My friend James Brausch has recently closed his comments on his blog. The
primary and most important reason is to deal with the plethora of comment
spam.
If you wanted to comment on any one of James’ posts, you’d now have to do it
on your own blog by posting an article and linking back to his. Since his
blog supports it, your link will automatically create a trackback on his
post, which will be listed in the comments area.
But the wonderful byproduct of this is that it increases backlinks (i.e.,
link popularity) to his blog.
Some people have said this to be dishonest, which befuddles me. I get over
10,000 spam comments a week on this blog — thank goodness for the Akismet
plugin! — so I understand James’ reasoning, especially in light of the fact
that he values his time deeply.
(Something I, and you too, need to do.)
However, I love the comments area. It helps me to gather feedback,
oftentimes when I’m looking for answers, ideas or insights that are helpful.
But I also did a bit of research and discovered that 94% of the spam occurs
on my older posts.
That’s why I’ve decided to do something similar.
Comment Timeout is a plugin that does a variety of comment moderation tasks.
For example, it automatically rejects posts with too many links or spam-like
coding within them.
But the most important feature is the fact that it can automatically close
your comments after a specified period of time.
(I’ve set mine to 120 days. Posts older than 120 days are automatically
closed. But it will keep posts with recent comments open, namely posts with
comments made within the last 60 days.)
If I wish to get feedback, I’ll simply post a new blog entry. Trackbacks and
pingbacks are always on, and will be listed in the comments area. So if you
wish to comment on an older post, simply post a new article on your blog and
link back to it.
For those who don’t have a blog, I will invite readers to create a thread on
my forum and link to it, instead. Either that or I might use some of the
many poll or survey tools out there, such as Wufoo.com or dPolls.com.
But to encourage comments on current posts, and as a result of applying the
plugin above, I’ve decided to activate another plugin.
With the WordPress default package, links within comments apply a
“no-follow” attribution, which was initially meant to curb spam. (Many
spammers have exploited this in the past, for the sole purpose of gaining
linkback popularity and pagerank when search engines index blogs.)
As we now know, this is not true. At least, not any longer.
Spam is almost always automated (spammers use software that “blasts” blog
comments all over the ‘Net). And they don’t care. If spammers can get blog
viewers and authors to visit their sites, gaining extra backlinks is but a
mere bonus for their despicable efforts.
The problem is, just like email anti-spam filtering can kill innocent
bystanders (such as legitimate, double opt-in marketers), no-follow
penalizes my blog’s commentators in the process.
After twisting my virtual arm for a while, Andy Beard who has been
evangelizing the benefits of do-follow for some time has finally convinced
me.
But rather than being forced to tweak the code, my friend Denis de Bernardy,
author of the Semiologic Package of plugins, which I highly recommend,
offers a Do Follow plugin that reverses the default no-follow attribution.
So now, when you comment, your link will get the benefit of the backlink.
About Michel
Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, marketing strategy
consultant, and instrumental in some of the most lucrative online businesses
and wildly successful marketing campaigns to ever hit the web. For more
articles like this one, please visit his blog
and subscribe to his RSS feed.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This whole area of “comments” interests me greatly.
It appears that you can have the best content but if no-one comments or links to you, then the SE treat your content like spam.
Plus should I freely encourage links out through comments, if they are not coming back in..!
I posted on the semiologic forum but got no answer (ironic), because their template makes soliciting comments hard (as users have to first register, then confirm their email and then write).
More instruction on “comments” is welcome, especially the plugins that assist.
I generally don’t let people link inside their comments unless it is to point to something related to the post. If it is their site, again, I edit it out or don’t accept the comment.
I’m not sure what you mean about engines treating your content like spam. They don’t do that because you have no comments. You just don’t have a healthy community yet is all.
I get tons of traffic and still have plenty of posts that get few comments or none, but the post does fine in the engines.
Having comments is indicative of the conversation you are generating and likely the links to that post are in proportion to the comments from people blogging and linking to it.
The post I have the most comments on is also the one that gets the most google traffic, for instance. Because people talked about it and still do – they are linking – and commenting.