Tag Archives ⇒ comments section

Web 2.0 – Comments

· Brandon Hann

This is more for the bloggers out there, but it also applies to any website that provides a way for visitors to comment on your content or in response to other comments. In keeping with the concept of visitor interactivity, the purpose of providing comment space is to engage your visitors. When they feel like they’re more a part of your site, you will get better response to your offerings.

As you have seen on my website, almost every page and post has a place to put comments in regards to the content on that page. I say “almost” because there’s no need to have comments on static pages like contacts and so forth. Anyway, it would seem that having a comments section is a no-brainer and what else would need to be said about them?!

Well, I have a bit of advice for you. A lot of blogs that run comment sections do not properly utilize this great tool. How many times have you ever left a comment on someone’s website and you kind of felt like your opinions were being tossed in a black hole? If this is happening, what’s the point of posting a comment? Here’s some DOs and DON’Ts for your comments section:

DOs

  • DO allow visitors to comment. What this means is don’t force people to register just to put a comment on your site. Sometimes people just want to add their two cents and the last thing they need is another username and password to remember.
  • DO respond to as many comments as you can, especially the ones with questions, duh! Your visitor wants to feel like they’ve been heard and even though they might get some responses from other users, it’s much more meaningful coming from the site owner (or at least the author of the content).
  • DO remove the “rel=nofollow” link attribute from the website address listed on the comment. I advise this because I feel that if someone is taking the time to make a comment after reading your content, let them have a free backlink. Again, don’t worry about the spammers–you can get rid of them with other techniques.
  • DO install anti-spam protection. It’s true, once your site picks up traffic, all the spammers in the world will descend upon your site like it’s made of gold, but you can stop this by using simple anti-spam plugins.
  • DO return comments if people have related blogs. This shows that you’ve taking your time to view your visitor’s websites and it might even allow you to get your site a backlink.

DON’Ts

  • DON’T hide your comments. Some blogs hide comments, therefore making users click somewhere to drop the comments down. Of course this might be helpful if you have hundreds of comments on a single page, but generally, you want to ensure that comments are a part of your content.
  • DON’T delete negative comments. If you prune your comments so that your content always shines, you’re fooling yourself. Let people say what they want. Isn’t that the reason why you started blogging in the first place? It’ll create a well-rounded experience for everybody if they know they have can open dialog on your site.
  • DON’T ignore people. Some people leave comments to ask you questions or make requests. The moment you start ignoring people because you feel above them is when you will lose your traffic. Keep reminding yourself that these people don’t need to come to your site.
  • DON’T allow spam. Some blogs don’t have checks in place to either look for spam or at least moderate all comments for approval so a lot of spam gets through. This doesn’t just affect your site. Spam being on your site can also affect every site you link to and those webmasters will not like that!
  • DON’T disable comments altogether because you’re afraid of people’s reactions to your site. The purpose of the Internet is to share information and teach people. Maybe someone can show you a thing or two in return.

My two cents

Don’t kill your blog by overlooking something as simple and basic as a comments section. Utilize your tools and harness your visitors so they keep coming back more and more. You’ll notice in short time how fast your site can grow by keeping it fresh and allowing people to interact with you.

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What is the "rel=nofollow tag"?

· Brandon Hann

When it was introduced by Google, a lot of people were skeptical of it’s purpose. It is generally believed to have been created for the sole purpose of controlling how a website’s PageRank is shared among external links. As an example, if your website has a PageRank of 6, every external link you have on your site will get a piece of your high score, which means one link from you might be worth 10 times that of a single link from a PageRank 1 site.

Now, I don’t have all the numbers and nobody really knows for sure what the exact formula is, but that’s the general idea. Higher PageRank sites are considered “authorities” on their subject matter and are therefore granted with the ability to make other sites more important in terms of search rankings. The thought process behind this is that the high PageRank site is a legitimate site with actual, helpful information and in turn, they are rewarded for their quality contributions to the Internet. Google then realizes that if these site’s are going to link to someone else, they must be serious about it, so they allow the PageRank to “flow” to the next location.

What exactly is it?

The tag is used in a link such as this:

a href="https://www.ledfrog.com/links/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Click here.

It tells Google that this link can be followed (meaning the GoogleBot will go to that page and crawl everything there), but it does not have to take into account the PageRank score of the referring site. Other search engines take the meaning literally and do not even go to the site. I believe Ask.com is the only site that simply ignores the tag completely.

So, where does the rel=nofollow tag fit in? The first automated occurrence of this tag can be noticed on most blogs out there–more specifically, the comments section. It’s true, if you thought that by running around the Internet, posting comments on other blogs in hopes that all those website links were creating backlinks to your site, you were wrong (most of the time)!

There actually are two valid reasons for doing this to blog comments. The first one is obviously spam. I can’t even begin to tell you how much spam comments I get on my site each day and my site isn’t a high traffic site so far. Spammers in this sense will generate some very generic comments for a random posting on your blog and somewhere within the comment or attached to their name will be one or more external links. The second reason for doing this is that you might not want to be passing on your PageRank to sites that are completely unrelated to your site as this, in time, may actually cause your own score to go down.

My view on this is I don’t use the rel=nofollow tag on my post comments for two reasons. One, spammers don’t get through on my site. I use the Akismet plugin and it stops almost everything! When it doesn’t, the comment sits in queue and waits for my approval anyway, so what do I care? The second reason is that I feel when someone makes a comment on my site, they are taking the time to contribute an opinion of some sort and the sheer fact that they were even on my site usually means they run a blog that’s similar in content, so I give them some credit.

The rel=nofollow tag that was supposed to help with spam and the degradation of PageRank has now become a useful tool in the art of PageRank Sculpting. In the coming days, I’ll be going over more about PageRank and SEO tips to maintain control of your external links.

I recently found a blog post that discussed this topic more in depth, including a blurb about the opposite for no-follow called do-follow. If you want to read more about these tags, check out Jack Nguyen’s blog post.

How do you get links?

Getting those links that will pay out the oh-so-important “link juice” can be a difficult task. I wrote an article describing 10 ways to increase traffic to your blog and while these tips will most certainly pony up the links, one thing to remember is link building takes time. The normal way of doing this is a perfect balance of creating great content that other sites will link to automatically and getting out there and literally trading links.

However, there are services out there that can help you build your links. Professional link building services can save you the time and frustration of having to go out all over the Internet and round up links by yourself. They can also tailor linking campaigns specifically for your website–something that you may not have the time to do. This way you can guarantee that the links you’re getting aren’t simply random, unrelated websites.

Ultimately, as enough time passes by, the amount of links that your website obtains will grow. As long as you keep creating great content and providing services and information that people want, your site will grow as well.