Blog comments are not sincere because it’s all about improving traffic

I like blogging, I really appreciate to share with the world ideas that I usually keep for myself. So that’s very nice. Of course when you blog you want to know how your blog is considered by the readers. The best way to do so is to read the comments that people make for each of your articles. My blog is quite new so I understand that comments are not so present currently but I read a lot of blogs and also the comments attached to articles.

I must admit that at first I read these comments as a naive blog reader. But I learnt with the time that these comments are usually posted by other bloggers that have one clear objective in mind: to create an ecosystem and promote their own blog by contributing to the blogosphere. To prove what I’m saying (as I know the first reaction is to think I’m a bad person that maybe is jealous about successful blogs) I will take a simple example of two blogs.

1 - http://us.gizmodo.com/

As you can see this blog is very very famous (alexa rank 864 and pagerank 6/10). So now let’s look at the number of comments that have been made for each articles. At the time I’m writing this article I see (May 5th 2007):

first Article, “Pawsense, Kitty Keyboard Kover Prevent that Feline from Typipppppffffffssss” has no comments.

second article, “AdWatch: Xbox 360 Elite Commercial Runs Out of Bullet Points” has 5 comments only.

third one, “Motorola RAZR 2, A Huge Gallery Covering Every Angle” 8 comments.

thourth one, “Battery Test: Motorola’s Qs Go Head to Head”, 2 comments.

Now If you try to comment one of the articles you will need to register so that could explain the small number of comments but I think the real reason is somewhere else.

2 - http://www.johnchow.com/

This one is less famous (alexa rank 2728, pagerank 6/10). Now you can see that for this blog the minimum number of comments is around 20 and it’s easy to find articles with 40, 60 or 90 comments (like “15,000 AGLOCO Sign Ups“). Okay you don’t need to register but that’s not the main reason for me because the first blog is a lot more famous.

So what is the main difference with these two blogs that can explain this ??

Don’t you see ? In fact the John Chow blog offers you to enter an URL when you post a comment and this will create a link on your name when the comment is published. So the persons who comment find here a great opportunity of promoting their own blog (most of the time the links will redirect to the person’s blog). Even more obvious, john chow makes a list of the top commentators on the homepage with still a link to their blogs. So that of course pushes to comment more and more to have the opportunity to get to the homepage ! So writing comments brings you traffic though a direct clic from the comment or through google or blog networking websites.

By analyzing carefully the comments from one article to the other you discover that it is very often the same persons that comment the articles. It also help in building the personality of a blogger to give its opinion about other blog articles because of course most of the persons who comment articles tries to give “real opinions” on the article but not the majority I think. The aim is to write something quickly and to be present.

Now you also probably all know that the comments are moderated of course so a blogger can agree in some way with a selected part of the comments contributors to validate all their comments with maybe something in exchange, who knows ? Otherwise it should be quite easy for anyone to comment every article (with a text that of course is related to the article and that has a meaning) so that he gets to the top commentators list.

I suspect this because if you look at the source code you can see that comments link (which label is the name of the commentator) is marked as “rel=‘external nofollow’” whereas the top commentators list contains real links that are not marked with a particular relation. So being listed in the homepage becomes very interesting in terms of Google traffic and ranking !

Now I don’t read blog comments as before and maybe you shouldn’t as well.