Place of Stuff

Anyone who has commented on any of my posts will be aware that I have the CommentLuv plugin enabled on this site.  And lots of thanks to RT Cunningham of Untwisted Vortex for putting me onto this plugin.  You could do a lot worse than follow his advice on building SEO for your site.

For the uninitiated, how does CommentLuv work?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  By enabling CommentLuv on your blog, the plugin uses the feedreader associated with your commenter’s blog to list their last post.  So, by commenting on someone else’s post, you get to have your own post linked to.  No extra effort and no trouble.  In fact, if a lot of us use it, we will all end up with a nice little legitimate (very important) backlink – and we all do it for each other.  It’s probably not that clear, so here’s a picture to illustrate (click the pic for larger):

An example of CommentLuv

Just above the moderation buttons (of which, more later), we can see a link to RT’s last post at the time he wrote that comment.  The most current post of the commenter will be listed.  So if you post once a day, and comment here once a day, every comment will link to the current comment for that day.  For very little effort, your post has gained a backlink.

Why is this a good thing?  Well, for one, you don’t have to mail me to request I backlink to you (hint: unless your blog is really cool or I visit it regularly, I’ll probably not do it) and if you see how many different people leave posts on this site, you’ll see what a timesaver it is for me!  Another plus is that instead of just getting a link to your main site, you get a link to a particular post.  So you can focus your link – if I write a post about the UK government, for example, and you have a post about the government you have gained a focused backlink that is relevant.  Since, I hope, you were going to post here anyway, a free backlink is a good thing right?  Also, unless your post looks like automated spam, I won’t remove it – you don’t need to hide your link, I’m letting you leave it.

For blog authors, those moderator buttons (see, I told you I’d get back to it) save you a little effort – rather than having to go through your dashboard to moderate comments, under each comment in the post are a set of handy buttons to allow you to edit, delete, moderate (doesn’t delete, just moves it to the moderation queue) or mark as spam any comment.

This plugin is now at version 2.1 – if you haven’t already, update your version, there are new features coming up and you’ll need to register to see all of them.