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Comic - Comment Policy and no nofollow

Comic
Shrinking Self Esteem, Source: bLaugh.com (↑)


I found this comic today and thought this fits perfectly to my recent post “Small Talk About Business - Comments Closed”.

You might attribute low self-esteem to people who close comments on their blogs. But most likely you will be wrong. Too Low quality comments and comment spammers are said to be the real culprits. However, it's a funny little comic. I hope you like it , too.

I came up with a simple way of addressing the comment-spam problem in a less offensive way.

Reading many blogs and browsing even more I got the impression that the quality of a trackbacking article is usually higher than the quality of most on-page comments.

It certainly takes more time, consideration and effort to write a post that is the source for a trackback. Many blog authors simply won't do it, because it just does not fit into their schedule or their blog line. Others may have some valuable input, but don't have a blog or want to deal with that.

Do you really want feedback from your readers or not?

If yes, then make it easy for them. It is that simple and the oldest usability guideline — even though a very general one — that I know of.
“Many blog owners state that they want high quality comments only, and propose that trackbacks are the way to get them.”

Well, that is not necessarily true. By closing comments you might turn off the most valuable feedback you could get from someone like e.g. Guy Kawasaki [See: The Top Ten Stupid Ways … (↑)]. The average quality might be better, but you might miss the TOP-5 comments. Are you aiming fot the average or the top? If you do not want comments on your blog at all, just close your comments. You can be sure to reduce the quantity of feedback.

You want comments, but don't want to deal with moderation?

Isn't the reason for moderation to weed out garbage and spam comments to protect the quality of your blog, your readers and yourself. May I suggest the following:

  • Open Comments, but say in your comment policy that you only publish the TOP-10, TOP-5, or none, whatever.

  • Build a history of approved comments throughout your blog to show people what you mean. This will raise the quantity and quality of your published comments.

  • At your leisure, browse the comments — you might find very good ones sometimes — and publish them.

  • Have spam prevention software in place to deal with the spam-bots automatically.

  • Use a similar policy for trackbacks.

Another reason, why some blog owners prefer to get trackbacks instead of on-page comments is, that trackbacks are incoming links (”search engine food“).

  • Well, reward your readers that take the additional time to write a trackback with a rel="follow" attribute value in the link versus a rel="nofollow" in comments.


Those have been my ideas, when I saw the little comic. Share your opinion with me.

By the way: I will have a no nofollow policy for trackbacks (rel="follow") to this E-Biz Booster Blog implemented shortly, and I also will have a one paragraph type of comment and trackback policy published.

Your
John W. Furst

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E-Biz Booster Blog on : How To Add A Different Perspective To Your Blog

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Earlier I have written about the value of comments and trackbacks for a blog, and I have joined the No NoFollow (↑) movement to show appreciation for my readers' contributions. That's only one side of the coin. The other side is that you can

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Stephen on :

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Policy implemented!

All trackbacks have a follow tag now. Happy trackbacking.

Stephen on :

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Now we have joined the "No NoFollow" movement completely with this blog. All comments and trackbacks have the follow attribute value now.

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