saynotofreelinks | 16/07/06 - 00.16 |
In the blogosphere comments sections tend to have a few fields for you to fill in. Your name, your email, your website/blog and then your actual comment text. Now the most important part of the comment should of course be this last field perhaps coupled with the first field. If Bill Gates is criticising Vista it has greater significance to me doing it for instance. However I tended to notice that more emphasis was give to the website field. I thought that in some cases people were only posting to slip in their link to their website or blog without it looking like a cheesy chance to plug oneself. Putting a link into the main comment text is often seen as a shameless self-plug, but adding your blog URL into the comments form is not.
The idea that people would post comments to just get the link love that they need to pump them up Google or to increase their traffic by a little bit is not really impossible to fathom. But I would rather as a regular reader of comments sections on blogs only see comments that are written by people who really have something relevant to say. So to do this I take away the prize. On this blog URLs entered are not linked rather they are displayed as text. If you like what the person says enough to want to read more then you can navigate to their website yourself.
And when posting on other people’s websites I use the website “http://saynotofreelinks/” which normally would give a 404 when clicked or a search for “saynotofreelinks”. I was partly inspired to this when I heard Steve Gillmor voice that links were dead. Since then several people have started to agree that the value of the hyperlink is declining and linking is not the best way. Allow people to find stuff themselves so they find everything you’ve done rather than the snippet that was originally discussed. Even though the value is falling I still think people are willing to make comments just to get them for free, and I don’t think it adds to the web.
Why don’t you just leave the websites as links, but then put the nofollow thing on them. That way, readers can easily click onto websites of people that interest them, but there are no search engine perks for the link.
I think that makes it too easy for readers to get to the commenters site. So the incentive to readers of commenting for a traffic increase (on popular blogs) is still there. If someone really said something interesting then it would be worth Googling their name, or copying and pasting their web address to find out more. If the extra effort required to actually copy and paste the web address is too much then I suspect that the comment was really not of that much interest.
Stuff like that normally just makes me grumpy at the owner of the blog. Just my opinion but there you have it. It’s your site, so I don’t really care what you do with it. But, stuff like that does affect my desire to return to the site.
I wanted to thank you numerous a lot more for any impressive blog you’ve got established there. Its jam packed with suggestions for individuals who are certainly enthusiastic about that will matter, acquire this approach particularly submit. May be actually virtually all very fairly sweet and also innovative for some and browsing your blog post posts is a wonderful get pleasure from my estimation. And such a new good-sized item! Martha i will probably have fun along with your thoughts with what have to undertake in the near future. Many of our detailing is really a travel time prolonged and just insert tips may very well be put to excellent make use of.
Now i’m stunned at this particular.