How to Get More Comments, Less Spam

I’ve done a cou­ple of things to my blog, mostly “behind the scenes,” that I want to share with you.

Some well-​​known mar­keters have closed their com­ments on their blogs. The pri­mary and most impor­tant rea­son is to deal with the plethora of com­ment spam. If you wanted to com­ment on any of their posts, you’d have to do it on your own blog by post­ing an arti­cle and link­ing back to it.

Since most blogs sup­port it, your link will auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate a track­back on the 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 their blogs.

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. Blog com­ments 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, there are 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 often use soft­ware that “blasts” blog com­ments all over the web). And they don’t care. Because, 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 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 the Author

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