Comments on: WordPress books, removing link condoms, obscure novels

By: Sarah Elkins

Sarah Elkins — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:22:32 +0000

I think folks who contributeto a blog by commenting ought to get a little link love. Yes, some folks abuse this, but I think Akismet takes care of most of the spampliments, doesn’t it?

BTW — thanks for the tip about Do Follow! I’ll install that on my site.

By: Jason Penney

Jason Penney — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:20:02 +0000

I’ve been using DoFollow on my site for some time (before that I used a less flexible plugin to do basically the same thing).

One of the things I like is that I can have it configured to keep the “nofollow” for X days, which gives you a window to remove spam comments before the “nofollow” is taken out. I feel that if someone takes the time to participate on my site they deserve the “link love” (and if there’s an otherwise useful comment with a spammy link there’s always the “Delink Comment Author” plugin which just removes the author link from the post).

By: Robert Nagle

Robert Nagle — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:16:08 +0000

Sadi Ranson Polizzotti is a distinguished poet (and Teleread contributor). How many blogs or publications have linked to or reviewed her online poetry? How many times has she commented on other people’s blogs?

By: veinglory

veinglory — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:15:18 +0000

I don’t understand what no follow has to do with self-publishing authors. Most links are not nofollow and a good author will get googlerank from reviews and commentary. I also disagree that nofollow has no human purpose. It allows one to discuss a site without endorsing it or improving its ranking and so exposure.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sun, 04 May 2008 15:15:01 +0000

So, gang, how do you feel? Should the TeleBlog retain the link condoms?

In theory I like the “wide and open” angle. In practice, I worry about vile and greed-driven sites benefiting from occasions when legit site operators do not prevent the comment spam from appearing, and what’s more, I doubt that big media outlets will pay that much attention to what’s happening.

How do you feel? I myself think Google and the blog companies are right here. The way for self-published authors to promote themselves is to get others to write about them and also to create attention-worthy sites that others can decide, on their own, to link to.

This will reward the better self-published folks, who can put more effort into their own sites, email lists and so on, and less effort into comment campaigns.

Just my hardly infallible opinion here.

Thanks,
David