Commenting disabled motivates me to comment
I usually hate comments. I purposely avoid them, especially on my local news’ networks website (KSDK).
Today, I read something that really compelled me to say something, but:
Commenting is off.
Let’s follow the hops.
I started out reading @CaseySoftware.
Which took me to Open Sourcing Google Page Rank Algorithm.
Where I clicked on “…effect SEO practices actually have“.
In this article, the author reviewed the top ranking sites for 10 different keywords. He noted that their HTML markup was awful and inconsistent with some SEO “rules”. Therefore, he concluded, that SEO does not determine a page’s rank, but rather serves as a tie-breaker between pages with the same rank.
Arg.
On-page factors account for a small percentage of a site’s search engine ranking.
I really wanted to post that in the comments, so that others who read his post wouldn’t buy this flawed experiment as the whole truth. But, he said “No commenting allowed”.
Comments can add a tremendous amount of value to your content.
For example, Brandon Savage posted about why there are no enterprise projects written in PHP. He planned to fix that in 2010 by contributing a bug tracker, VC browser, etc. In the comments, he was overwhelmed with people suggesting not to reinvent the wheel and to check out Arbitracker.
Without comments enabled, Brandon’s monologue is trivial to me. But, he started a conversation that introduced me to a potentially useful piece of software that I was unaware of until he boldly stated he was going save the world.
If you are sharing an observation, please leave the commenting enabled for others to chime in.
2 Comments so far
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As Keith mentioned in his tweet, yes, I do have commenting set to auto-close after three weeks of the posting date to prevent spam on old posts. I was finding that 95% of the comments after a couple of weeks were spam. The remaining 5% were either of questionable legitimacy, or weren’t really adding much at the end of the conversation.
I was a little surprised that my post didn’t get any comments after three weeks, as I realize my opinion was a bit contentious.
In the meantime, I’ve temporarily reopened comments on all articles regardless of date. If you want to continue a conversation about SEO over there, I’d be happy to respond.
By Joseph LeBlanc on 12.22.09 1:33 pm
Thanks Joseph for the reply.
I know that monitoring comment spam on older posts gets to be a pain. You are so removed from the context and content of the post that you must reread them sometimes to determine if the comment is even remotely in scope.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t notice the date on your post until after I had hacked out a response.
Originally, I was under the impression that @CaseySoftware was linking to your response to the Page Rank algorithm being made public as well, from a slightly different perspective. Which I eventually realized was not the case.
Either way, I wanted to contribute the Seomoz Search Engine Ranking Factors (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors) link to your post and see if that swayed your opinion on the matter at all.
Thanks again.
By Timothy on 12.23.09 9:07 am
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