It should not be surprising that this is a difficult decision for many bloggers. Despite its public nature, a blog is often one of the few personal spaces that a blogger truly owns. A place to shelter a battered ego. Reader participation threatens even this small space. Post comments are a nice compromise to the dilemma. Comments are firmly separated from the post, but carry an obligation to be somewhat related to the post. They are an acknowledgment of the blogger. Ego affirming rather than ego threatening. It is no wonder they have become such a popular format for reader participation.
However, participation requires effort. This is a blessing and a curse. A curse because "0 comments" can itself become an ego blow. Why am I being ignored!? A blessing because new readers use the number of comments to judge whether to spend time reading - the first barrier to overcome in our ADHD world. A dozen comments says "other's thought that this post was worth reading." It is social proof of time well spent.
How then to encourage comments? The best way to encourage comments is to respond to them. Open a dialog with your readers. Let your readers know that you appreciate the time they took to make the comment. But there is still the bootstrap problem. No one will comment unless there are already comments. Mariuca's First Commenter Club is a great way to get that first comment. Why? Because you promise to link to the blog of the first commenter.
When someone links to you, you have acquired a backlink (as opposed to a forward link from your blog to someone else). Why are backlinks important? Search engines like Google use them to calculate how popular a particular site is. The more popular, the higher in the rankings, and the more traffic the search engine will send you. Backlinks are a form of voting for your blog.
But not all votes are equal. Back in 2005, Google introduced the nofollow attribute for links. If you look at the HTML for a nofollow link it will look something like this:
<a href="http://www.google.com/" rel="nofollow">Google</a>In essence, the nofollow attribute tells Google (and most other search engines) not to count the link as a vote for the page being linked to. Why would you do that? The problem is that without the attribute, you may be automatically voting for your commenters. You can probably imagine that comment spammers took advantage of that. Once you have so many commenters that you can't effectively police the spam, it is just easier to discourage the spammers by adding nofollow to every link.
For many bloggers, it'd be nice to get to that point. When you want to encourage comments, providing automatic dofollow backlinks is an easy way to do it. Dofollow links are just links without the nofollow attribute, also called "nofollow free." This is enough for most blogs, but if you really want to rev up the number of comments, you can use a dofollow Top Commenter list. A Top Commenter list rewards the readers that comment most by providing a dofollow link to the commenter from the sidebar. That means the commenter receives a sitewide dofollow link, that is, a dofollow link from every page of the blog. For some blogs, this can mean hundreds or even thousands of dofollow backlinks. A big incentive for loyal commenters.
Well obviously blogs with dofollow Top Commenter lists are interested in your comments. But, as a reader, how to find them? I'm currently enjoying participating in the Entrecard community, and I couldn't find a list of such blogs for Entrecard, so I've started one below. The list was a little tricky to put together, because many Top Commenter lists that purport to be dofollow are constructed with javascript. Why does that matter? Because the search engine robots generally don't execute javascript - they see only the javascript code, and not what it produces. Basically, Top Commenter lists built with javascript (which includes most blogger blogs) don't count.
The following list should help some Entrecarders get more comments. The sites are listed in order of current Google pagerank (PR). I stopped at PR3, but I'll go through the PR1 and PR2 sites if there is interest. Sites with a '+' sign after them also provide dofollow links from each comment.
PR6
www.killerbuffalo.com
themelib.com
PR5
www.neonbubble.com
PR4
thebobofiles.com +
writer.fitzhome.com +
potpolitics.com +
nthambazale.com +
www.reason4smile.com
www.joetech.com
www.kongtechnology.com
ahkong.net
www.mybigworldofcrap.org
PR3
usws.isgreat.org +
www.painrelief101.com +
www.stevenhumour.com +
bryanking.net
www.getmoneyenergy.com
www.mommawannabe.com
pctutorialsonline.net
www.buckrobin.com
www.earnontheside.com
www.marketing-business-review.com
theblogentrepreneur.com
blog.winesworld.com
learnthis.ca
PR0
paulubiadas.com
If you'd to be added to this list, removed from this list, or have something other than your domain name as the link text, just let me know.
