Finding Commentators For You Blog

The internet is a truly exciting modern phenomenon. Watching television has always been a one-way process as the viewer is merely a passive spectator. Whereas on the World Wide Web it is possible to interact by uploading videos, vote on articles and join in discussions with one or more other net users.
One of the attractive features of writing and running your own blog is the hope that you will entice other internet users to your site and that they'll leave comments underneath your published items, after all, there's nothing more attractive than being at the centre of internet chatter.
Those in the blogosphere though that engage with their readers in such a way are few and far between. 99% of bloggers are merely talking to themselves.
There are millions of blogs today and much noise for users to fight their way though in order to reach your worthy output. For instance, Technorati has 100 million blogs in its index, with a new one started every second.
The main reason why many new bloggers give up after just a few months is the realisation that they are merely writing without a audience with few, if any, readers taking an interest in their work.
One way of attracting new comments on your published items is to leave out the nofollow microformat.
In 2005 Google introduced this little bit of HTML code in order to fight the spam that was then on the rise. It didn't stop spam, if anything it has increased, but it has now become standard with most blogging platforms.
Nofollow works by adding a little piece of code to the link as so: rel=”nofollow”. This puts a stop sign out for seach engines: Don't follow this link or count the website it links to in your index.
On most blogs commentators have the ability to add their own URL to their comment. If the nofollow tag isn't used then the search engine bots flow through the link unhindered, and the website linked to is given a little boost in its search engine rankings.
In effect, not using the nofollow tag rewards the commentator by allowing a little link juice to be passed to them. Thus, it's an extra incentive to post regularly.
Not using the nofollow format is commonly called joining the dofollow community. There isn't actually a tag called dofollow but it is a label that many bloggers display with pride on their sites as it signifies their intention to reward their contributors.
However the down side of this is that your blog could be targeted by spammers who have no intention of ngaging with your website other than using it as a platform to post up their rubbish Viagra URLs or other dodgy links.
As the blog owner you need to be aware of what steps to take in order to minimise or remove the spam threat if you drop the nofollow microformat.
Firstly, in order to remove the nofollow tag then there are different methods for different platforms. For Wordpress there are a number of third-party add-ons that are easy to install and implement. Go to the main Wordpress site and type “dofollow” into the search facility on their plugins directory page and this will list a number of modules.
For Blogger you need access the code in the backend. Go to Edit HTML => Edit Template and make sure you click on the Expand Widget Templates checkbox. Now find the two instances of nofollow in the code and replace them with external. So before altering they will read rel=”nofollow” and afterwards they will read rel=”external”.
To stop spam make sure that you moderate all comments first. Don't allow the blogging platform to publish new comments until you have reviewed them.
You also need to implement other anti-spam features.