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.