In the age of blogs, the feedback mechanism which goes hand in hand with blogging is on the brink. It is a sorry state of affair and reasons are far too many.
For starters, we have over a million blogs and users find a new blog for the unique information they may need. So, the question of loyalty withers, and so does the connection between the blogger and the reader. Even some of the top blogs, including social engines such as Digg is losing commentators fairly regularly. I am an avid reader of Digg and there used to be a time, say 4 years back when comments used to run into several hundreds, and today, the case has completely turned around.
Secondly, spamming has taken the sheen out of blog commenting. A lot of spammers, in order to get backlinks back to their site, comment on blog posts, placing links of their staked websites. This spam has brought in control measures, which avoids spammers, and at the same time some of genuine bloggers, who would like to share their websites through your website.
Google and other search engines recognize the tag no-follow, which basically tells the search engine spiders that these links need not be followed. WordPress, the world’s most popular blogging engine has enabled no-follow tags for all its comments. So, for spammers, blogs that run on WordPress don’t benefit much. And, as I said earlier, some genuine commentators who would like to have a reciprocate with a comment to a link onto their website are turned away as well.
To encourage blogging, if you are using WordPress especially, download the do follow plugin and set it up on your installation. At the very least, we can show a candy to those who comment on blogs for their own gain, but, in return, we can get something meaningful out of it. What say?
A portion of this article was originally published on Tech Pedia on the 18th of December.
