Increase Comments - Sneaky Experiment
June 10, 2008 By: Justin | 21 commentsDoing well at SEO is sometimes about being creative and sneaky sneaky. Recently, I made a post about finding do-follow blogs. One of the methods I showed you was to use footprints to find dofollow blogs. I didn’t cover all methods though. There is another I’m going to mention here. First, I’ll explain my sneaky experiment.
One factor used for ranking is a freshness factor. Pages with fresh unique content are given a slight boost while the content stays fresh. Posts that get a high volume of comments get a little extra Google love. When someone leaves a significant comment, they’ve “updated” your page for you. When Google bot returns, it finds “fresh” content. There are multiple ways to improve comments on your blog, but I’m going to try a sneaky little test.
Many do-follow blogs have a badge that says “U Comment I Follow” on it. These badges have known file names and alt and title text. Many times bloggers leave the default information and BAM… a footprint. This image can be used to track down blogs that are do-follow.
To learn how to track down blogs using this footprint, check out the post over at Slightly Shady SEO. (He gets a dofollow link, because his blog is great)
I’m going to footprint my blog as a do-follow blog, but I’m not going to remove any nofollows off my comments. The goal is to get my site to show up in comment search engines and software. This will drive new traffic and comments to my site! This will increase my exposure and increase the number of people leaving comments (in an attempt to get their little backlink).
I’m not going to be a prick though and falsely advertise my blog as a do-follow. If you visit my blog, you won’t see me say that I dofollow any where.
So How Am I Doing This?
=P
Sneaky Sneaky
At the bottom of my blog you will see this icon:
That’s the footprint hidden as a cute zombie kitty.
Here is the HTML:
<img src=”http://seozombie.com/ifollow-red.png” title=”U Comment I Follow” alt=”U Comment I Follow” />
It uses a standard known badge file name and the standard title and alt attribute text. Do-follow search engines will think I am do-follow =P
Is This Ethical?
No more or no less than people using footprints to find my site just for a link. They’re trying to use me and I’m going to use them. If they’re smart, they’ll know how to tell if my links are dofollow or not. I’m banking that many are lazy or use automated services to do their comments.
This may be “gray hat”, but I think its perfectly acceptable.
What About Spam?
I’m not sure if my spam will increase or decrease. I get tons of spam as it is. Its not that hard to deal with though. I think it’ll take me less time to approve or deny these comments, than it would to write the content they’ll provide. If I have to spend 10 seconds on spam, but I have 400 to 500 words in comments, that’s a fair exchange to me.
I’ll let you guys know what effect this has.
Filed Under Online Success, SEO, Sneaky |
Tagged With features, Online Success, SEO, SEO Factores, Sneaky
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Hi Justin,
Very interesting post. I see you have your zombie kitty at the lower right corner. I have been wondering about this U comment I follow badge I see everywhere…
Do let us know your experiment. By the way, what do you think of the following software for backlink building?
http*://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/*
I’ve used the free version of the software, but I haven’t paid for the full version. I’m still playing around with article marketing. I know people like Court and Vic claim article marketing is a great way to build links, but many SEO say that you shouldn’t just submit to any old directory or article submission place. I haven’t made my mind up on it yet.
Vic from BloggerUnleashed pushes that software and has some videos on his site showing it in action.
Hi Justin,
Appreciate your opinion on the software. I have downloaded the free version and will be trying it. By the way, do let me know if I am doing something wrong with my commenting as I am a complete newbie in many aspects.
My knowledge is limited to blogger blogs and that’s limited too.
Thanks again, :)
No need to worry Ms RP, your comments have been great =P
Unless you’re spamming or promoting gambling sites or such, I have no problem with any comments
The blog finders work reasonably well. You’ll find that the higher the PR on a blog, the more they have countdowns that don’t send live links until the 5th post or so. Nothing is clear cut out there and good results are best left to good outsourcing.
hehe… not that I am endorsing black hat methods but if I was I would have to send some kudos for some original thinking… nothing better than using the spammers to help you out - assuming any of them leave a comment worth keeping.
It will be interesting to hear your results.
Nicely done Justin
lol, yeah I’m not trying to get too shady on this blog, because its my legit flagship, but I’m always up for experimenting. Its the only way to learn new stuff in SEO =P
Hi Justin,
great tip and innovative thinking I have to say. I decided to give this technique a try on my blog also. Am I allowed to use your cute little zombie kitten code?
Very sneaky, and I hope it works for you - you’ll just have to hide away this post so they won’t know what you’re up to ;)
Hey Justin,
I see you have revamped your homepage. Just curious, is it for SEO purpose?
By the way, I just bought my first ever domain and it’s an aged domain. The funny thing was I didn’t know what will happen next after I buy one off the auction, haha.
The domain is 7years old, has many backlinks from Yahoo. But not indexed at G…must be banned and I wonder why? No clues from the backlinks.
It was for a few reasons. I think the white color is a little easier to read and a little more professional. The the other theme I was using had a lot of options, and I thought it was a little too bulky. This theme slimmed down the site a bit. Its a little better with SEO, but I still need to do some code work to it to clean it up some.
I’ve purchased a few pre-owned, and it works out just like a new one in terms of setting it up. When a domain is on closeout its set to a parked page. When this happens Google will deindex it and start discounting links. And eventually even Yahoo will discount links, they’re just slower than Google.
It doesn’t mean its banned or anything though, just Google knows its up for sale and the site is empty. They deindex it until it turns into a real site again. Once you relaunch it, Google and Yahoo will start counting the links again. I hope that helps.
Thanks for the explanation. I am still not sure until I get ownership of the domain and put it up and wait…
You mentioned domains get de-indexed when they are parked. But I noticed there are some which remain indexed..
Anyways, guess I am one of the people who get their hands dip in before they know what to do, sounds familiar? lol
Hi Justin!
Very Clever thinking, but it seems like it is unnecessary.
Grizzly defined it with his remark; “If they (the spammers) ever leave a comment worth keeping…”. This is the crux for me, I want to reward my commenters with dofollows for contributing to my posts, and any negative posts are either self-evidently worthless, or get Zorfed anyway by the poster.
Yeah, I’ve received more random comments recently, but none are of the quality I would approve. They’re all one liners.
You mean like ?
“A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco, wrapped in paper, fire at one end, fool at the other.”
or
“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.”
Lol…Sneaky :). Google absolutely loves pages that are injected with fresh content ever so often. Getting random replies or comments to your posts in the form of spam or genuine bloggers would give you a higher page rank and increase your search engine ranking.
I ended up switching to dofollow anyways, just to see how it effected my comments. My comments have increased.
Justin, has this idea worked out (maybe its too soon)? You say comments have increased but has it increased PR or standing with Goog , that you can tell?
I ended up changing over to dofollow comments anyways, lol. It seemed to increase the number of comments, but many are low quality 1 liners. It has encouraged my regulars to leave more comments. They tend to write long comments. It also increased the amount of trackback spam I get.
It’s difficult to measure its affect on rankings, because at the same time I’m gaining lots of links and aging. Too many factors are variable to really tell.
Alexa is a confirmed factor.
Freshness is very easy to test.
-Create a totally unique keyphrase and track Google rankings as soon as 10 minutes.
-Create a post with a competition of 5 or 10 and watch the rankings over time.
This site theme looks like Dateless sniper theme from Courtneytuttle.com
what do you mean when you said, you did some clean up work on the code.
I want to change the header and put nice one to dateless sniper theme. any advice?