Should You Put Your Keywords In The Name Field When You Comment?

Posted on July 1, 2008

There’s an interesting discussion going on at Problogger: Should you add Keywords to the Name Field when you Leave Comments on a Blog?

Some people get really upset about this. I can understand why - keywords in the name field do look spammy. But my feeling is - as long as they’re commenting, I don’t really mind the keywords. I don’t do it myself, though.

The discussion reminded me that I haven’t tried a plug-in recommended some time ago by Steven Lohrenz: it’s called KeywordLuv, by Stephen Cronin, and it allows commenters to add their keywords after their name, like this: Derrick@Online Business Blog. The keywords are applied to the commenter’s URL. So my example would appear like this: Derrick from Online Business Blog

This seems to me like a reasonable solution. It’s only of value if the WordPress default ‘NoFollow’ tag is removed - I use Denis de Bernardy’s ‘DoFollow’ plugin. By the way, there’s an interesting post on Google’s official blog from 2 years ago where they discuss the introduction of the NoFollow tag, and the reasoning behind it. The fact that it penalizes legitimate commenters seems to be ignored.

More interesting reading:

NoFollow is for Blog Spam…no Paid Text Links, wait…Paid Ads…Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings - Part One
13 Reasons Why NoFollow Tags Suck
Spam Shields Up!