May 13th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

–NOTE– I’ve just updated my version of the commentLuv plugin, it looks like the later versions comply with how WordPress handles nofollow by default, i.e. unless the blog owner is running a DoFollow plugin then these links are not followed. There is still some value in using this, most blog owners don’t like spammy keyword rich “user names” associated with comments, at least this way you can use whatever link text you like.

I don’t think there is a SEO’er out there who doesn’t appreciate the benefit that leaving comments on blogs can bring. WordPress in particular gives you a very easy way of getting a 1-way link back to whichever website you specify in the comment form. The major problem with this is that these links are nofollowed by default, in other words Google won’t count them. There are a number of WP plug-ins designed to bypass this and reward your commentators with a followed link, one of the best (and one I’ve been using since it was first written) is CommentLuv. The CommentLuv plugin works by looking for an RSS feed associated with the domain you specify in the comment form, it then creates a followed link to the top entry in that feed. If you’re the sort of person that only creates blogs then commenting on blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin is a perfect way of building your link profile. My problem is this, most of my main money makers are not blogs, they are static websites. Where there’s a will there’s usually a way though. This is a trick I’ve been using for a while to get the CommentLuv links back to my static websites and it’s one I’m going to share with you now.

The trick is of course to hand code an RSS feed for your static content and then use the “link – alternate” tag to let CommentLuv know about it. What where when? Don’t worry, I’ll make it easy for you. Download this RSS file. If you open it and have a look you’ll see the basic guts of an RSS file. All you need to do is replace the Title, Link and pubDate values with your sites information (make up the pubDate). The title value will be used as the anchor text for your link from CommentLuv. You’ll notice that the RSS contains 5 items, I prefer to do it this way. When I first tested with only 1 entry CommentLuv didn’t seem to pick it up so I’ve settled with 5. Don’t forget that you can always rotate the items pubDate’s if you want to change what page is getting the link when you comment. Once you’re happy with your RSS file upload it to your website, call it whatever you like, I usually go for rss.xml – make sure you can surf to it by entering its URL into your browser.

Now that’s done all that’s left to do is alter your home page HTML. Here’s what you need to add to the header:-

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Site Names Feed" href="http://www.yourdomainhere.com/rss.xml" />

This is assuming you uploaded your RSS file (called rss.xml) to your home directory.

From now on every time you leave a comment on a CommentLuv enabled blog with that domain your most recent item in the RSS file will be linked to using the link text you specified. It’s a fantastic way of getting a followed, keyword rich link back to a static domain.

Oh yeah, almost forgot to mention. There are also several forum scripts that pick up on this as well :)

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