Have you ever tried to leave a comment on a blog only to find that it required you to register, sign up for an account, confirm your email address, fill in a nearly impossible to read captcha (am I the only one who can’t read those half the time?) and then stand on your hands while chanting, “Please let me comment, please let me comment…”? Then by the time you finally have access to comment, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to share in the first place!
It’s hard enough to get readers to leave their thoughts, without asking them to jump through more hoops. So don’t.
I can hear you now, “But the spammers…” Yeah, they stink. I agree. But we can combat it with better strategies.
Strategy #1: Install a spam filter on your comments form.
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Understanding “Do Follow” and How to Tell
After my recent post on rewarding your blog commenters I got several questions asking what “do follow” meant and how to tell if a blog has “no follow” or “do follow” on it’s comments.
What is “No Follow”
By default most blogs are setup so that the links to a commenter’s website are marked “nofollow” – that means that the search engines won’t follow the link and won’t count it towards the linked site’s PageRank or popularity.
Here’s what a no follow link looks like:
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