A blog is very different from a website in the sense that it is more personal. A blog becomes more lively and interactive when readers start commenting. I have been lucky enough to have interesting comments from a few readers on Malaysian Tech Blogger. Its been the same with Newgadgetsguru as well (my other blog). But sometimes you could encourage people to comment on your blog by giving them something in return. One of the ways is to enable “do-follow” on the links of the comments that have been approved.

Both blogger and wordpress consider links in posts as “no-follow”. So what is the difference between “no-follow” and “do-follow”? The difference is very simple – if a link has a “no-follow” attribute, then google will not follow the link when it crawls your website. This means that the link will not get any incoming link advantage which results in no page rank “juice” for the link as well. This was initially done keeping spammers in mind. But this thinking has changed over time.

By changing a “no-follow” attribute to a “do-follow” you will be able to entice a fellow blogger to leave a comment on your blog. After all, he or she gets a free incoming link just by leaving a comment on your blog. Make sure that you advertise that your blog is a “do-follow” blog so that others will know. There are many articles on the internet on how to convert your blog to a “do-follow”. For blogger, it is suggested to use “U Comment I Follow” while there are quite a number of plugins available for wordpress blogs.

But sometimes you will encounter people who are commenting just for the sake of getting a link to their blog. Usually happens when you see irrelevant and insipid comments just to get some link juice. How do you thwart them? This is the part why I love wordpress so much! There are so many plugins available for a variety of stuff and Lucia’s Linky Love is one of them.

Here’s what it does:

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

You can download the plugin at Lucia’s Linky Love.

What else can you do to encourage comments on your blog? Another great plugin for this purpose is CommentLuv. CommentLuv is a simple plugin which when installed not only displays the comment from your reader, but also the last post of the blog that is being linked. Isn’t this great? Now not only does your reader have an incoming link, but he also has free publicity of his latest post on your blog as well. This is certainly a bonus for your reader to comment on your blog.

Here’s how it looks like:

Interesting stuff? I certainly think so. Well I’ve already implemented both these plugins in my blog and you can comment away to see incoming links to your blog.

So how do you check if a link on a blog or website is “no-follow” or “do-follow”? Someone might actually advertise that his or her blog is “do-follow” but in reality it might not be. To ensure that the blog is “do-follow” all you need to do is to install this add-on in Firefox. Yes, unfortunately it only works on Firefox and not on IE. Download Searchstatus and install it on your Firefox browser. All the instructions are detailed in their page on how to use this tool. It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to get started.

Once you have it installed, this is how it will look like:

Not only does it display the “no-follow” attribute of the links on the page but also shows the page rank, alexa rank and much more. Definitely a must-have tool for bloggers and SEO specialists.

Well I guess that’s pretty much the tools you need to ensure good comments on your blog. I hope that this will be helpful for new bloggers who are looking for interaction and comments on their blogs. If you did enjoy this post or if you have comments, you know what to do! Have fun commenting!

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