Feb
Google, Comments, Bounce And You
by admin
I started blogging just over three months ago and I was hungry for traffic. I read that one way was to remove the nofollow attribute on comments. The theory was that this would attract people and they would comment and get a back-link as a "reward".
What has happened? Well, people have commented… and I am thankful to most, but the quality has been crap in a lot of cases. I have deleted over 135 comments (leaving 630) because the comment was:
- From "SEO Corp" instead of a person.
- A "Great post" type comment, not really adding to the discussion.
- Begging for a link exchange.
- An invite to a contest, view their site etc.
For 2,3 and 4 most if not all went in the bin. For 1, if it was a decent comment, at first I went to their site to get the author’s name, some I even emailed. Then one of them replied that they would "fight for the right" to use a company name instead of their own.
That was the last straw, I made a comment policy, but still they came… It was around this time I read Grizzly’s post The Death of Do-Follow. Around the same period I also read Wayne’s post Ending Do-Follow for Google.
Both of these posts had valid points why we should not be a part of of the dofollow movement. In the meantime, the link-hungry comments kept coming, wasting more of my time. The clincher was Collin’s post Top 9 Reasons DoFollow Can Hurt Your Blog.
During the time I have been blogging, there have been two Google PR updates. This site still does not rank. Just before the first update several of the PR predictor sites said I would get a PR4. Hah! And I have seen many other lesser sites get PR. Let me state for the record that I am not a Google "fan-boy" chasing after PR. But PR is used as a yard stick to measure a site’s success and I want to be a success. At the moment I am a failure as the site is unranked.
Part of the problem is, I believe, the comments. Only a fraction of them link to sites that are relevant to this one, and we all know how much Google likes relevance. Plus every article has an average of ten comments that link to all and sundry.
Another part of the problem is the Bounce Rate. I am a member of EntreCard, it’s chief advantage and disadvantage is that you amass credits by dropping a card on someone’s site. This has "encouraged" people to chain drop, spending as little time as possible on a site, which makes for a high bounce-rate.
Now part of it could be that this site is crap and all those comments were just ego stroking me into a false sense of security. But in real-life I do not succumb to it so why should I online. In three months I have seen only 1 comment and 1 post putting the site down. The comment was just a slag off, but I left it in. The post had some valid points and I am working on it. We all need a wake-up call at times.
Now why should I be worried about the bounce-rate, traffic is traffic isn’t it? Well, Brian made the observation of Google using bounce rates for ranking purposes?. And indeed, this would be a good method for Google to filter out the MFA sites, but real sites that have a high bounce-rate would also suffer.
The third "problem" could well be the Friday shout out to my fav posts in EntreCard. They link out to all kinds of fun/interesting but non-relevant sites. This will have to change…
So what am I going to do about these? This week I will:
- Be adding the nofollow back to comments.
- Delete your comment, if it’s not from a person instead of a keyword or company, without even reading it.
- For the real commentators, I shall add the Top Commentator plugin, set to reset at 30 days, at which point I shall post a list of them pointing to their best article.
- Add the related post plugin to the bottom of each post.
I was thinking about adding the comment-luv plugin but it would have the same effect as removing the nofollow.
All of these changes will happen by this coming Friday. I’m sorry it’s come to this as the real commentators will lose the back-links. But between the Top Commentator plugin and the 30 day post, in the long run you will not lose out.
Tags: back-link, bounce, comments, dofollow, entrecard, Google, nofollow, pr rank
Category Blogging |
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I run into a lot of the same problems on several blogs I run. as for now - i’m leaving the dofollow and commentluv. I also use the related posts plugin.
But for any comments left with a keyword - i just hit the askimet spam button and forget about them. Our comment policy and our comment box clearly states the policy.
I dont see what the fuss is about with do follow and no follow.
Even with No follow you are still getting a backlink it simply means that you will not pass on any pr juice to the commentors website.
I do have do follow set on my blog but commenters only get the benefit of the do follow attribute afer x amount of comments and they must be decent none spammy ones as well.
Hi Collin
Crumbs, sounds like it was getting quite tiresome. I can only imagine the scenario from what you describe above.
But good for you for making the changes. Personally for me it makes not much difference to if a site has nofollow or not. That for me is not the reason, or the main reason for leaving a comment, but of course it is nice.
What I do find fun is the TC plug-in which I know you replied to me about on your other post. This for me has actually really helped my Technorati rating, not that I really know how it works, and prior to a few days ago, had no idea that commentating on sites with the TC plug-in would make such a difference. So only finding this out when I logged on to Technorati for the first time in ages was quite odd.
As you know, I tend to waffle abit in my comments, but nearly always on subject and I hope that the somehow add to the post. As I said, for me, it’s something I enjoy doing, that’s the main driving force. Any subsequent benefits are ofcourse welcome.
It’s a easy rule of thumb for me, if the post is interesting, I will post a comment. If it’s just ‘average’ I will read it but as I won’t have anything worthwhile to say, I don’t say anything. Not even a ‘great site, please check my own blog!”. 
So happy that you are implementing the changes. As I feel this really benefit the commentators who are serious about saying something worth while. And ofcourse you benefit as well. We all win as far as I can make-out.
I finally got the TC plug-in to work but it’s a bit of a botch, not quite how I planned it. Can’t do anything with it, but it will do for now and does work.
Also added the ‘comment luv plug-in’ and will see how this goes.
So no need to apologise as far as I am concerned, it all sounds good to me.
Graham
Blog & Web Ramblings from ‘my’ Gutter.
I see what you mean about attracting spam comments with dofollow, but I’m keeping it that way for now. There is one thing you missed, though, and that’s about CommentLuv having the same effect as removing nofollow. That’s not true, because I asked the plugin author about it, and he said CommentLuv does not remove nofollow. You have to use a separate plugin to do that.
Also, my blog still has PR of zero - same as you - but I’m hoping it’s too new to have been ranked yet. I’m not a Google PR expert, but I think those only happen occasionally.
Hopefully, that will improve with the next round of ranking.
Whenever I see an article about anti-dofollow, you can really tell who are your quality commentators. The four people above me all use their name and leave valid comments. I believe this is the way blogging comments should be. People should comment to contribute, not for a link.
At any rate, thanks for the link and I will be glad to see you experimenting with the top commentators instead.
After reading your article, I quickly went and checked my own blog to verify that CommentLuv does indeed add rel=”nofollow” on to its links (just like Heather said before me).
Of course this doesn’t save you from being indexed by those words what your commentators have in their post titles, but I feel that its good middle ground between do follow and no follow policies.
I’ve been using the dofollow policy since I first heard about it and have no regrets. But - I have noticed that a lot of searches to my blogs come from terms like comments may be do follow, okay, that isn’t exactly the term, I can’t recall it offhand but it is intended to find do follow blogs all the same. Obviously those comments will more than likely be spam but I still feel that it hasn’t gotten to the stage (for me) where it is such a problem that I have to add the nofollow tag again. If it did become unmanageable then I would probably do as you have.
Colin,
In the end do-follow comments have very limited benefits for the commentor - nobody has achieved great PR or keyword authority from leaving comments on hundreds of blogs. These links are seriously discounted by Google and a waste of time if people are only commenting for link juice - there is no juice. I have no-follow on my comments and still get dozens of comments from people who have something relevant to say and I get almost zero spam. If you have a decent site (and you do) with good content you will get good comments regardless of “do” or “no” follow.
Re: your lack of PR. One of the downsides of do-follow is that you may be linked to Bad neighborhood sites which will penalize you - run a check on your site regularly to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad site. This site has a tool for doing this - it’s not mine so don’t think I am spamming you - just wondering why you aren’t ranked.
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/
BTW - a lot of do-follow sites simply have too many outbound links - this is not good and Google advises against it.
Good post and thanks for the nod. Hope to see you ranked next update.
I agree with Grizzly, i do not use the do follow method but I am still getting comments. Maybe not as many as you are getting but for me a simple thank you from my readers is enough. About the PR thing in which I am no expert, some of my categories pages and old posts was given pr3 but my home page got a PR 0. Some SEO sites said that this happened because more sites are linking to my posts which is on that category than my home page. So I guess that PR ranking is still heavily affected by links. The whole SEO thing really gets confusing. I guess I still have to research more about SEO.
Colin,
I think you are under a bit of a misconception about PageRank and how and when it is updated. The PageRank update is not based on data as of the date of the update… it is based on a snapshot of the data from some previous date. What you need to do is look at how many inbound links you had, and what strength they were, on the last snapshot date, not the last export date.
As near as I can tell the last snapshot date was about Dec 16. I can tell that by looking at the dated posts on a high traffic blog (I usually use Matt Cutts’ site, mattcutts.com/blog/) and see what the date was on the last post that has PageRank. In this case every post of his from Dec 17 and on has no PageRank, but the one on the 16th is a PR6.
Prior to Dec 16 you had made, I believe, 24 posts. Now, PageRank is only doled out to pages that are not in the supplemental index. You currently have a total of 83 pages in Google’s index right now… but only 34 of them are non-supplemental. Back when you first started the ratio was probably much higher. Therefore only links pointing to non-supp pages before Dec 16 would have counted towards your PR.
I’m actually not surprised that you are at PR0 right now (which is different from not having any PageRank yet), but would highly suspect that by next export you will be doing fine.
Hmm, I just changed to dofollow, but this is food for thought. I’m thinking of changing again — to a WordPress plug-in called Lucia’s Linky Love for the extra features it provides. Thanks for the head’s up, however.
I just hate the fact that we all have to bow down to the Google gods to make our website found. Hmmm, I could be on to something?
Thank you everyone for your most helpful comments here.
@David Hobson: There’s no fuss, I was just a little concerned about the negative effect of adding dofollow to a new blog.
@Graham Smith: Good to see you got it working.
@Heather: Thank’s for the info and correction, I’m thinking about it as it effectively doubles the out-going links from comments.
@Collin LaHay: Indeed, I have had only one nonamer comment to this article so far
@Grizzly: thx for the link, tried it but the link-tester either freezes or takes longer than 20mins when it hits the feedburner links…
@Michael VanDeMar: thx for the explanation, wasn’t the supplemental closed down - thought I’d read that recently, along with some people having their ranking updated since the pre-xmas update?
And here’s an open question to anyone that knows. How does google count back-links? If I do a ‘link:site’ I get around 200 but when I check G’s Webmaster Tools I have 6908.
Thanks Colin - the BN program seems to have developed a problem - too bad as it was a handy little tool.
The site:link query will give a sample of Google’s indexed links without duplicates - they never tell you all the links indexed, just a sample.
Webmaster tools lists duplicate IP links, multiple page links, multiple site links and all the links that you may not get credit for re: PR and keyword authority (links that are basically ignored). This list may be incomplete as well.
Google is secretive about what links they use in the algorithm and does not publish the entire list - only a sampling.
I have a couple of PR7 sites and Google has never shown me the PR8 and PR9 links that I know I have and that play a huge role in my PR7 rankings. It is presumed that they hide links in order to stop people from gaming the system - if you know exactly what links are needed to get a certain PR then people will seek them out one way or another. This way no one is ever quite sure which links work and which don’t. This of course can’t be verified as Google doesn’t discuss the issue.
I still do not understand this and how it works, Google try to make the simple things hard.
@Beverly: PR means Page Rank though it might just as well mean Popularity Rating. How does Google know that you are popular? By the number and type of sites that are linking to you. There is more to it but that is the essence of it. The more sites that are linking to you, that are of a similar nature to your site, then the high your PR will go.
You should also link out to other similar sites in your posts, and you should have links between your posts, for example this post is linked to the previous post in the series.
Damn CK, you definitely seem like you beating yourself up over this PR thing. “At the moment I am a failure as the site is unranked.”
Damn, honestly, I think you’re more successful than me when it comes to blogging and I know I’m making a decent amount of money (in my own eyes) WITHOUT a PR.
Look over EVERYTHING besides the PR and you seem to be VERY successful.
But whatever you do in general, I’m sure your visitors will continue to come back and comment anyways.
Jay
@Jay: Nah… I’m not beating myself up, just being objective. True, I am hard on myself, I’ve set goals, some of which I’m not meeting yet. Generally though, I’m fairly happy about the growth of this blog.
As far as the PR thing is concerned since I cleaned some things up and gone to nofollow on comments last week, in the last couple of days I have noticed that in Webmaster tools my back-link count has shot up from around 6,500 to over 14,000 and at the datacenters my PR is increasing, mostly to PR3 but some are showing PR7!!
I don’t know if this is cause and effect or if Google is in the middle of an update and this is just coincidence.
As a fellow non PR ranker I have to agree with everything you said here. This whole issue of following or not following can be quite confusing. What I eventually opted for was to go for DO follow but I do not advertise the fact. The real commenters now get REAL links, the rest do not know what the situation is. I hope you get the PR your blog deserves pretty soon.
I don’t see why i could not leave a SEOed name if my comment is of some real value. I’m not saying i encourage this practice, but i’m not condemning it also. As for the Do-Follow plugin, i took it out a long time ago, as i kept being bombarded by spam and i ended up on lots of Do-Follow blogs lists…
@Arnold: As you probably know by now, Google just did an update and I’m now at PR3
From what I’ve read, I think it’s better to nofollow, at least until the blog is established and has PR, maybe a year… Then rethink about going dofollow.
@Mike: I don’t want to belabor the point but comments are primarily a conversation area, they are not meant for SEO, getting a back-link is a secondary benefit.
I know it’s to early to really say( (1 week) but spam level seems about the same so far.
I definitely understand where you’re coming from. It’s sad that people can’t just be happy with the link and have the decency to use their name - they’re ruining things for everyone.
The Top Commentator plugin is a good middle-ground, though. It wouldn’t be fun or easy to spam everyone successfully on a monthly basis. Hopefully this reduces your comment-filtering workload and lets you spend more time writing posts and enjoying life.
@Stephanie: Since going nofollow I have noticed a drop in both comments and non-name names but the comments do seem a little more “human” if you know what I mean. Spam has actually increased from 3-4 a day to 10-15 a day
Such is life…
Well your a page rank 2 as of now. Good job, continue the good work. You may have just earned an RSS Subscriber.
@Jared: Actually it’s a page rank of 3 although at at least 11 of the data-centers it’s a PR7!