Comments and Links: Friends or Foes?

Aug 21st 2006 View Comments




You have a modestly popular blog with a regular readership. Would you have a comment system on your blog, with lots of your fellow bloggers commenting in your posts, or would you rather shut off your comments to force links and trackbacks?

The question arose as I read How to spice up your comments area. Nektros.com has an extremely active comment system in relation to its feedburner-reported subscribers so yeah, Yvonne knows how to get a comment system rolling. But when we’re talking about leveraging the community-linking aspect of the blogosphere for SEO purposes, are comments self-defeating?

The topic has been covered before (I can’t find a reference right now) and I’m still not sure where I stand. Comment areas obviously increase repeat traffic, create a very loyal audience, and author lots of great content for your blog, but each comment is a reply that could have been written on a blog, boosting link popularity. I suppose it comes down to timing and needs. But changing comment policies like underwear isn’t likely to cultivate any sort of comment regulars.

I’ll take my chances, what do you guys think?

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  • http://www.yeblogger.com Nathan Waters

    Interesting thought, I know people like http://www.stevepavlina.com have turned off comments and only allow trackbacks.

    But IMO I think it ruins the community involvement with your blog. If you’re post is thought-invoking enough people are likely to blog about it as well as comment, whereas switching off comments altogether you run the risk of people neither commenting or blogging on your posts.

  • http://nektros.com Yvonne

    Hi Dan,

    I’m speaking from a biased point of view, but comments are crucial for building site popularity. If you turn them off, readers will think you don’t care about them. Also, I’ve found that by conversing with readers through comments on both their blogs and my blog, I gradually built relationships with them, and in turn we naturally linked to each other when we found something interesting on each others’ blogs.

    Very interesting article, thanks for the good read =)

    PS: I’ve found that with Feedburner, the more subscribers I got, the less hits and comments I’ve received. It’s a fact of the ’1 million feed subscriptions’ Internet life, I guess ;)

  • http://www.website-content-writer.com Amrit Hallan

    Hi Dan.

    I think we can leave that to visitors and keep the comment options live. I’ve observed people do what they want to do. If someone wants to write a blog post instead of leaving a comment he or she is anyway going to do that because bloggers are always looking for opportunities for creating blog posts. Comments enable even those visitors to express themselves who don’t maintain blogs. As you mentioned, they help generate a community, and consequently, loyal repeat visitors. This way you don’t have to rely too much on search engines and link-based rankings.

  • http://www.douglaskarr.com Doug Karr

    What’s it worth to you?

    That’s the question you need to ask yourself. If your comments become uncontrollable, I would say that they are not having much impact and will probably degrade the performance and impact of your site. I love reading comments and want to show visitors that I’m approachable.

    Also, many of the readers that I have don’t have blogs, so trackbacks aren’t an option for them.

    Regards,
    Doug

  • http://danzarrella.com Dan Zarrella

    Doug, I believe that *is* the most important question, what are the comments worth to you.

    If your monetization strategy be based on the scale of unique visitors, inbound links and SEO are your best bet. Like an adsense publisher.

    But if you benefit comes from something other than direct sales/response building a community certainly builds your “brand” (as/if it exists in the blogosphere).

  • http://danzarrella.com Dan Zarrella

    “If someone wants to write a blog post instead of leaving a comment he or she is anyway going to do that because bloggers are always looking for opportunities for creating blog posts. Comments enable even those visitors to express themselves who don’t maintain blogs.”

    That’s a very good point Amrit, and perhaps getting those with out blogs involved in the conversation may lead to them becoming bloggers themselves.