To encourage comments, many Wordpress blogs use a Plugin call Show Top Commentators. This Plugin encourages feedback and discussion by rewarding readers for making comments. My Top Commentators are displayed on the right sidebar (under Recent Posts) along with the number of comments made in the past five days. The commentator names links back to their sites. Unlike links in the comments, the links on the Top Commentators are full links without a nofollow tag. That means the commentators gets loved by Google as well as traffic.
Looking at my Top Commentators lists, I can see that, from a SEO standpoint, three commentators are doing it right and the rest are doing it wrong. Getting a link on the Top Commentators list offers more SEO benefit than traffic benefits. It’s the same as buying a text link. The link sends you traffic but its main purpose to help you improve your Google ranking. Knowing this to be the case, then the anchor text for the top commentator link should be anything but your name (unless your name is very descriptive).
If you’re going to go after the top commentators position on a bunch of blogs, then it’s to your advantage to link back to your blog with something other than your name or blog name. Webmaster Labor is doing this correctly with Cheap Custom Content and Article Checker. Yes, he holds two spots on the Top Commentators list. Pretty evil, huh?
While it’s great to have your name on a bunch of top commentators lists, you have to keep in mind that these links are more for SEO than traffic. Ask yourself what anchor text do you want to rank for and use that as your name. You’ll still get traffic, but your Google ranking will increase.
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yeah, i see what you mean, I’d better get started and be evil!
I can see that there are already so many people taking advantage of the plugin.
get in line buddy, haha
Thanks, John! By the way, email me back on your thoughts on that guest article I proposed. It would make for a great tutorial on yet another way to make money online
maybe for those who are not doing it right, they just don’t want the benefit that it’d bring
I just always thought it looked cheap and cheesy.
Then again, I’ve done lots of cheap and cheesy stuff in the past…
or maybe they want their name to be popular. Although, with so many people having the same name? hmm..
have you noticed the shoemoney avatar showing on your sidebar? if shoemoney is reading your blog, you know you’re doing well, very well indeed.
well, thanks for the tips, and i’m staring to be evil.
let us know how long it takes for you to become fully evil
I come and visit your blog daily, but I never took the advantage and left a comment. will start doing that from now on and hopefully will get some link love very soon
Takes way too much work to get on that list…although there are fewer 200+ comment posters these days.
Hi John
I read your blog every day. The best make money online trick are in english and your blog.
Bye
Nice trick. I will use that evil
plugin also on my site.
That’s a good example of thinking behind the obvious: “nofollow” on comments”und “follow” on the top-list
Nice.
And now as johnchow.com is pr6 you should see your comments sky rocketing now on as per my prediction.
There will always be a dog race over a free link from a PR 6 site.
To pass 31 messages in 5 days could not be so hard, but now John put it as an advice, I think the count will increase.
By the way, the reason for the double entry in the Commenter area is I changed anchor text.
So are you saying that the article checker one is going to drop out?
Yep, its dropping as we speak
Did you switch because the first one was ineffective or because it was so effective that you thought you’d target another segment?
Not that the first was ineffective; I’d like to think both names are pretty strong…it was just time for a cool change.
yes. it is already dropping. too bad.
I wish there was a way for me to know how many time I posted so that I know when to stop!
BTW I noticed the drop in comments and was wondering what you were going to do to fix this.
But if you wanna get to the Top list and stay there you can’t stop commenting.
Think constant and relevant posts, Mubin; you just got to keep at it.
To fix it? I’d say he’s doing this
Since he wrote this post the numbers are climbing.
I’m not really trying to do any SEO yet. I don’t even have a page rank!
You’ll get some next time if you stay on the top commentators list and get some other links.
I have only 7 links, but one of them is from the review of JohnChow.com, that was enough to give me a PR 4, so it may be worth to try even with a zero PR.
You do have a page rank even though it might not be showing on any reporting tool. Page Rank is calculated far more often than the toolbar PageRank is updated. Don’t be mystified by the little green pixels.
i’m having pr 3 after the google pr update. so will start doing some evil marketing with the top commentator thing.
Thanks for the advice John, interesting information, although I think that it would be better to have a ‘Quality Commentators’ list. Seems to me like a top commentators list just encourages spam commenting. Won’t stop me from trying to make it on your list though!
$1,000,000
It seems to me that most people here contribute quite well actually. The person he talked about that holds two of the spots comes up with some really good stuff.
Thanks, Court, I appreciate that a lot.
It ain’t easy, but I always make sure I post high-quality comments as well.
This is evil. I certainly like to get to the top spot for the top commentator.
I am still surprised you don’t have nofollow for the top commentator area. OH, and I need to find some good text to link to my blog with… hmmm.
maybe to find the good text anchor is the most difficult part of this.
It is. I’m a long tail hunter. So there while there are a few places I could work to bump my rankings, I don’t see that are worth the effort at the moment.
haha…damn..it seems like John encourage you to comment spam.
He has been for many months
Nothing new here except the technique.
As long as the comments are decent and relevant, then I would have no problem. I would have a problem with a post whore!
Ditto!
Not that all Boss, I think we need the real thing, SERPs.
It functions functions
Encouraging people to become useful members of society, and fair competition throughout the land. Maybe not so fair, but it encourages competition for sure.
I wonder if anyone has thought through the difference in meaning between a “Commentator” and a “Commenter”. Almost seems like “word inflation” to call simple comments attached to a blog post a “commentary”.
Commentator n. A broadcaster or writer who reports and analyzes events in the news.
I know for example some of my comments may run too long and wordy, but I simply make comments, not “commentary”.
Hahaha, Dave, while I was writing my post, I was thinking the EXACT same thing, but decided that since John lists them as ‘Top Commentators’ I would just go with the flow. That’s hilarious though. That’s an example of a comment that is link worthy… QUALITY Dave, quality.
This question has plauged me for months. I personally like think commenter is more appropriate, but i guess commentator sounds better? Who knows.
That’s a great tip, I better start using my full name as anchor text, because I don’t even rank 1st in Google for my name. And that’s mandatory to achive mogul status
Are the top commentors list updated every month?
Running five day total.
isn’t it updated in real time?
It’d be nice if there was a star rating system for comments like John has for his blog posts. Then the top commentators plug-in could use a combination of post frequency and rating/relevancy to determine who gets listed in the top spots.
That was comment spam would become less of an issue as people would actually post genuinely relevant comments.
actually that sounds like a really good idea - I’d be interested to see that.
There was a digg like thumbs up and thumbs down plugin but everyone got into negative ranking no matter how good their comments, so I removed it.