Interesting Observations

Work At Home - Bruce May 13, 2008 at 6:29 pm

Why would you delete a comment just because of the anchor text? If they leave a legitimate comment on your blog then they are creating content for you for FREE!. Let them link back to their site. I always do. Now if it is a garbage spam comment that is different and I delete.

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Obama Lies June 19, 2008 at 11:31 am

So are you going to delete my post or let it stay? Or will you allow keywords in the name field if the post is relevant to the conversation?

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staticbrain.com July 28, 2008 at 7:43 pm

If it is a valuable comment, I actually edit the comment to use the real blog name, and kill the key words. I have also wrote anonymous where a name goes if I felt the site was totally spammy. The other thing I do is make judicious use of the mark as spam. There is also a plugin for wordpress out there to make a no follow case by case but I haven’t tried it yet. It sounds interesting though. If you could turn do follow or no follow free then selectively no follow that could be interesting. :-)

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Karlonia November 23, 2008 at 3:42 pm

One solution for this is to use the KeywordLuv plugin, which allows commenters to use keywords and anchor text but also makes provision for their real name (the format is name@keyword and displays as “Name from Keyword”).

An alternative to this is to have a standardized comment policy where people must include a name or username in the name field, regardless of whether keywords are used or not, for the comment to be fully approved. For people who do not follow the rule, you can simply remove the link but leave the comment — this is what I usually do if someone tries to link to a site that might get me in trouble with Google (bad neighborhood, link farm, etc.).

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Jim December 22, 2008 at 1:37 am

I would like to make several points here. First is I see a lot of people talking about commercial sites and deleting them automatically. I also seen someone say that if they wrote good content, that the visitors would come, this is plain out fiction. Let me ask you how many people could write loads of content about plumbing for consumers, and consumers just “love” all of that content? Kinda funny, ya think? It makes as much sense as a screen door on submarine, then there is the factor of location, so general plumbing information will not help the plumber in small town USA.

The next point is names, I really wonder how many bloggers really use their real names, mostly i see screen names, so, do you really “know” them as you try to convince yourselves that you do? So, I would suggest that if they take the time and effort to read the post and make a good comment that there is no real way to consider it spam, especially when when there are people on this post making comments about content being what brings traffic.

Links is the basic infrastructure of the internet, so why would you make a conscious attack on the basic structure without a reasonable reason to 1st: delete content, 2nd, deny a fair trade of link love in exchange for that good content,3rd: limit a person from making a living in these hard times to be “politically correct” when politics is the whole reason we are suffereing in the first place?

It is a rare occurance to get traffic from a blog to a commercial site from a comment, but what you do get is higher rankings in the search engines from the link juice (if it is a dofollow blog) and the keywords (anchor text).

I understand the arguement that a commercial site has no business having links on a personal blog, I have to respect that,But… you as a blogger have to realize that anything you do in life is not perfect, everything , even your most loved hobby to a pet project offers trials and tribulations, or it is worthless persoanally. So, if you want to blog on the net, then you have to deal with all of the issues that come with it, so either stop blogging or deal with them like an adult. Sorry for being so blunt, but someone has to speak the truth and expose the core of the issues here.

It is not that I am biased, just that I have a LOT of experience with both sides of the river so to speak. I am a professional internet marketer and SEO. I have been one since 2001, so i am no rookie and seen both sides of the arguement.

I have plenty of commercial and private blogs, and plenty of commercial sites. This is why I can say without a doubt that anyone who claims that content is king has no clue whatever about the internet and has never thought it through. Without links, you have little, if any chance of getting traffic of any kind.

I know, there will be a few right now starting to boil telling me in their mind that I do not have a clue, so let me clue you in and show you how a blog works.

First off, WP has a tag system that pings several pinging services if setup right, once pinged, they are then linking to you, so that is the first set of links. Next is sites like Technorati and others, these are high PR links to the blog. Next, if you are tied into the WP tag system, there is more links. We have not even started with others linking to you or the internal link structure of the blog itself.

How many of you web savy people who have “persoanl blogs” with a dot com? that stands for commercial.

next: how many web savy people shop online and buy from commercial sites? Don’t try denial, this past black monday went down 15 % and cyber monday went up 15 %. So, I would tend to think most of you do buy stuff online from commercial sites you refuse to help out a little. Not very nice, is it?

When that drain cloggs up, a lot of people go to the net for a plumber, 6you get disgusted because all there are is directories, not plumbing sites. but it cost that plumber 2k a month for decent placement in the directory, then you complain because the bill is so high, but you helped create that additional bill for being biased based on nothing. And yes, the directories can rule based on hundreds of thousands of properly structured internal links, something the local business does not have the time or knowledge to deal with.

If bloggers would allow the exchange of a good link that has keywords, you would cut down on spam because the legit ones would help you to keep it clean and report stuff to you because they do not want a spammer placing 25, 50, or even 100 links ina comment because it bleeds that pages power and makes the real marketers link less valuable.

I could really come up with a 10 k word post here, but comments are supposed to be short, sorry for the long comment and hope this info gives you some more points to consider.