Increasing the amount of people who comment on your blog
All blogs are not made the same. Many personal blogs and business blogs do not create an atmosphere that warrants others to post a comment to your blog posting.
One strategy to receive more comments is remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute within your blog comments. Many people who responded to my blog postings don’t include their website in the “website” field when making a comment. That is fine. Maybe they don’t have a website or they want to remain anonymous in the comment.
Others however do leave their website. This is fine too. If someone takes the time to read my post, want to leave a comment, I’ll let them put in their website address. However, the default setting in most blog software is the rel=”nofollow” attribute. That means if a search engine spider index’s your page they are not going to follow the link to the person who posted the comment. This is done because there IS a lot of spam comments on blogs.
If you are going to remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute, you will need to download a widget that will disable it. I use wordpress for my blogging software and the widget can be found at Kimmo Suominen’s website.
If you are going to allow your links to be followed, it is important that you moderate your comments. You want to make sure no spammy comments are coming through to increase someone else’s page rank on their website.
Having your links followed will achieve two things for you:
1. When a commenter sees that your site has a link to theirs, they are going to be more likely to come back and comment again. This creates more discussion and interaction on your blog.
2. When others see that there are more comments, they are going to want to voice their opinion as well. This will create lively discussion on your blog topic and create more of a community. This community will drive your traffic up and increase awareness of your website.
So, if you’re going to allow comments on your blog, go one step further and download a widget which removes the rel=”nofollow” attribute in your comments section. Your readers will appreciate it as there will be more comments and discussions on your blog.
What do you think? Do you have other suggestions? Leave a comment below ;)
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I think that’s a great idea. I’m going to try it out on my blog. Thanks for the tip about the dofollow widget.
August 28th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I am considering doing the Do Follow thing on my site, but I have heard that your search engine rankings can get penalized if you end up linking to “bad neighborhood” sites. I don’t know for sure though!!
August 28th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Jeni,
Your spam filter should be able to stop most of those types of comments along with their websites from coming through.
If someone makes a post with a website that I don’t approve of, I will either delete the entire comment or just delete their website address and keep the comment. It’s entirely up to you what you want to keep on your website.
You still retain control through moderating the comments.
Also, your website made my computer crash twice when I visited it, I had to take your url out.
June 29th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
You gained a new reader today, I find your blog very interesting.