Blogging – Following Commentators’ Links

February 14, 2008 by Louis Liem
Filed under Blogging Insights

How do you treat comments on your post? Do you leave by the default setting, which stops links to your commentators or breaking the walls and grant them a flow of link love. When I first heard about this movement (I don’t know when it started, but it’s been discussed since February 2007), I took a while to consider giving some of my popularity to others. Finally, I decided that do-following author’s comment links is a good idea to payback their effort.

There are always obstacles in committing good deeds. Bloggers who implemented do-follow attribute on their comment section grew tired of spams and decided to alter their appreciation to commentators in various ways.

I’m not debating their reasons, most of what they say are true. Generosity invites people coming. Do-following links give some people shallow reason to comment. Then they put their name leaving short messages like “I like it!”, “Awesome”, “I agree”, (or worse, anchor texts) with purpose is only to get backlinks to whatever URL they put.

So, how do I deal with such issue? Recognizing that the one of the solutions is to prevent blog bouncers visiting our blog just to drop comments, I need to set a minimum number of comments written before the author is eligible to have his/her links followed. I didn’t choose to alter to Top Commentators plugin because I think it’ll also cause people to send comments flood in order to have their name/anchor text displayed all over the blog (if it’s displayed on the sidebar, for example).

Using the same plugin, I can also choose to limit the dofollow link only to author’s name field. This way, links on comment text field won’t be followed. They can put whatever links they’re up to, my link juice isn’t leaking ! And since the comment text field is no longer interesting for robots, whatever is inside will take effect only to the eye of human readers. If comment authors realize this, they are encouraged to comment accordingly instead of just 2-3 words.

Give, and it'll come back to you Maybe the plugin I am using could help you revive your support to “no nofollow” society. But if it couldn’t, I’m sure that your endeavor to appreciate blog readers will keep moving on!