Bloggington Blog

CommentLuv Plugin for WordPress

One of the age old questions that faces any beginner blogger is this:  Once I get people to my blog, how do I get them to comment?  I think it goes without saying that the singlemost important factor in encouraging people to comment on your blog is to provide well-written, engaging and informational content.  However,  numerous helper strategies have been developed to help encourage blog commenting.  Many of these strategies have come and gone, having passed in and out of favour quite sharply, but one of the more recent that appears to have the prospect of longevity involves a snappy plugin from Andy Bailey called Comment Luv.

What is Comment Luv?

Comment Luv is a small, single-file WordPress plugin that (optionally) appends a titled link to comments left on your blog.  It accomplishes this by parsing the feed of the blog left in the URI field of the comment form, extracting the latest entry then appending the link to the end of the comment. 

Using Comment Luv from a commenters point of view is very straightforward.  Simply enter the root level URL (not a sub-page!) of your blog in the URI section of the form, and ensure the check box to “Enable Comment Luv” is checked;  some, but not all, blogs will have this enabled as default.

Using Comment Luv on your blog

Using the Comment Luv plugin on several blogs, I have seen a marked increase in both the frequency and quality of comments.  It has also encouraged returning visitors to comment more often, and some individuals who operate several blogs make multiple good quality comments per visit which, as they say, is all good for business.

When using this plugin, I usually ensure the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” setting is checked  (under the current version of WordPress, v2.6, this is found under Settings -> Discussion).  This will help weed out some of the comments from those simply seeking a link back to their blog by leaving worthless comments.

By default, WordPress uses the “rel=nofollow” attribute for links left in comments.  This measure was introduced in order to help reduce link-laden comment spam.  A consequence is that by default the links appended by Comment Luv are nofollow and therefore do not pass link weight for Google ranking purposes.  To most, this is not an issue as it is the link visibility that leads to the extra traffic when using this plugin.  However, you could change your blog set up to pass link weight too.  Since I wanted this entry to be an introduction to Comment Luv I will not dwell on any advanced uses here, but save that for a later article.

You can find the Comment Luv plugin here or here.  As with all third-party plugins, be sure to remain up to date and always run the latest version.