Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away!
February 5th, 2008 by Stephen Cronin (Please wait) [Shortlink]Many WordPress blogs are adopting the CommentLuv plugin, because it gives readers extra incentive to make a comment – it automatically adds a link to the commentator’s latest post at the end of their comment.
This is great for the commentator, for several reasons outlined below. However, some people are not taking full advantage of the benefits.
Benefits For The Commentator
Commenting on a blog using CommentLuv gives you two potential benefits:
1. Increased Traffic / Readership
As people read through the comments, they can see the titles of each person’s latest post. If the title of your latest post appeals to the reader, there’s a good chance they will follow the link to your site, to read the post.
If you have great post titles, you will get traffic from this source. Some of this traffic will convert to regular readers.
2. Benefits To PageRank / SERPs
If the blog running CommentLuv is a DoFollow blog, not only will it send visitors your way, it will also pass you a little bit of PageRank.
Of course, Dofollow blogs already give you one link. While this link helps a little with PageRank, it’s less useful for the SERPs because the Name field is used as the anchor text. This will really only help you on searches for your name. That’s why some people put keywords in the name field – to help on searches for those keywords – at the risk of being marked as spammers.
CommentLuv gives you a second link, which has a couple of advantages over the first:
- It uses the post title as anchor text. If your keywords are in the post title, it will help you in the SERPs for those keywords.
- It’s a deep link, pointing to a page on your blog rather than the home page.
These advantages really are extra incentive to make a comment.
DoFollow CommentLuv Stolen Away
Some people are not taking full advantage of the benefit provided by CommentLuv on DoFollow blogs. They could be improving their PageRank and their position in the SERPs, but instead this is being stolen away.
How? The link for their latest post points to a FeedBurner redirect URL, not to the original post on their site.
This doesn’t stop people getting to the post, as FeedBurner will redirect them to the site. However, it means that the PageRank / SERPs benefits are going to FeedBurner, instead of the commentator’s site. Some of this may be passed on by FeedBurner, or it may not be. It’s not worth the risk.
Next time you leave a comment on a CommentLuv blog, check the link to see whether it goes to a FeedBurner URL or to the original post on your site.
The Solution
CommentLuv uses your feed to create the link for your latest post. If you have the Item Link Clicks parameter turned on in your FeedBurner settings, your feed will use the FeedBurner URL and so will CommentLuv.
If you want to change this, see the Turn off FeedBurner Redirect in RSS Feeds post by K-IntheHouse at ShanKri-la.
There are other reasons to turn the Item Link Clicks parameters off, as outlined by K: it makes it harder for people to access the post’s original URL. Why make it harder for people to blog about you?
Add the loss of potential PageRank / SERPs benefits and this becomes a real issue. Unless you really need the extra stats, turn this off!
Final Thoughts
Commentators: CommentLuv gives you extra incentive to make a comment, particularly if the blog is DoFollow. Make sure you take full advantage!
Blog Owners: CommentLuv can encourage comments and reward those who make the effort, but are you worried about being targeted by spammers?
I haven’t activated it on my blogs yet, but I probably will in the near future.
Tags: Dofollow, feedburner, pagerank, spam, Wordpress Plugins
