Comments add value to a blog post and reward the author with a link back to their website. This simple action can result in unlimited traffic to your website. A win-win situation.
Last week I talked to you about several aspects that impact link popularity. So, when I tell you today not to worry about link popularity in about 80% of the times you add a comment to a blog post, you probably think that I have totally lost it. But I assure you that this is not the case. Although I wished that my statement was wrong!
Usually, you have to fill out your name, contact email and your website URL before you place a comment. When you leave your comment, your URL is automatically linked to your name for a valuable link back to your website. Or so you think….
Another example is the very popular WordPress plugin, CommentLuv. When you add a comment to a blog post, this plugin publishes your most recent blog post underneath your comment, for an extra highly relevant link back to your blog. At least that is the intention.
What a lot of people don’t know, is that WordPress, by default, adds a “no-follow” tag to all these links. What does this mean for you? This means that, while you believe that you just got another backlink, in reality you did not. When the search engines come across these “no-follow” tags, they basically ignore the link. I know, it completely defeats the purpose of the CommentLuv plugin!
How do we know if this is the case on a blog we visit? The easiest way is to install ‘SEOQuake’. This is a Firefox plugin, that provides a lot of usefull information. Another one is SEObook. However, I have found that SEObook is not nearly as accurate (where it comes to backlinks) as SEOQuake. In order to check your links, you need to install one of these Firefox add-ons. If you don’t know how to install this add-on for Firefox, follow this link to a YouTube video that will show you exactly how to do it.
To see if you installed SEOQuake successfully, check the bottom right corner of your screen. You should see a logo with ‘SQ’, that could be either in color or in black and white.
The color logo means the add-on is turned on. A black and white logo means the add-on is inactive. Switching between active and inactive can simply be done by clicking on the logo.
When you hover over the logo and right mouse click you will see an option to choose ‘line-through “no-follow” and “no-index”’ . When you do that all links that have a no-follow tag associated with it, will show up with a strike through. This is what it looks like:
This is an example of a blog, who’s owner does not realize that wordpress adds a no-follow tag to your comment. Even though he/she thinks that they are making it very attractive to leave a comment, in reality it is not all that attractive at all.
Now that we know how to determine if a comment will have a link included, we still need to make sure that this situation is not happening on our own blog. Chances are, if you have not done anything against this problem, your blog is a “no-follow” blog.
You can overcome this problem by adding a ‘do-follow’ plugin. There are several of them out there. I like the one called ‘no nofollow’. Either search for it from your wp-admin dashboard by selecting ‘add new’, or go to their website directly: ‘no-nofollow plugin’, and download and install from there. (if you need more detailed instructions leave me a comment and I will make a quick video to show you).
Double check, using SEOQuake, that the links in the comments on your blog are now “do-follow”. Remember, you click on the SQ logo in the bottom corner and turn on ‘line-through for links’. If the hyperlinked text in the comments does not have a line through it, you can rest assured that your wordpress blog is setup properly for commenting.
I hope this helped. If there is anything you do not understand, please don’t hesitate to ask, because this is too important to ignore! If you come across blog owners who are not aware of this issue, please send them to this blog post, so they can make the necessary adjustments also.
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