New Comment Policy As Of 9/5/2008

This is my personal comment policy for this blog as of today.

Ordinarily, WordPress blogs have “no follow” commands to Google in their comment section. When blog owners like our network install software plugins like the one from Semiologic it disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments.

WordPress enables that as a default option so spammers will get no benefit from their work.

But that also penalizes thoughtful comments which I want to reward.

Though we have a huge spam blocker in place, still junk makes it through occasionally which I delete manually.

In the past, my practice has been to delete any comment where, instead of a name, someone put the SEO term they wanted to rank for. I considered them all spam. This does have the legitimate purpose of boosting page rank. I will not penalize the “little guy” (or “big guy”) trying to help themselves by commenting in this way.

Here is my new policy:

1. You may place your seo term instead of a name. BUT you must include your first name at the end of the blog post.
2. The comment must be ON TOPIC and something besides simply “Wow, great blog!” or other off topic phrases, though all sincere compliments are indeed welcome as part of an on topic comment.
3. If you put your link again, Google invalidates it anyway. I’m likely to invalidate it too. I have limited time and these look remarkably like spam to me. So, since you need only one seo optimized link in the comment, just lead with that, leave a comment and your first name and you will have your one way link!

Happy Marketing.

Here’s how to find more of those page rank passing one way blog links to your site.