CommentLuv vs. Google Rankings | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 3:05 pm – June 13, 2011 by JT_McGee

Recently, I removed CommentLuv from my site, and I wanted to explain why, and give warning to people who use it on their own sites.

I've always thought that CommentLuv was a net positive for any site.  That is, the benefit of more user-generated content was greater than the link cost.  CommentLuv does double the number of outbound links, but rewards any webmaster with more comments on their blog, which is good for search engines.

Due to new Panda insight, I no longer think this to be the case.  My search engine traffic has been in a precipitous decline, which I attributed mostly to the fact that "economics" (a common keyword in my SE traffic) is fairly cyclical–it's the worst summer keyword I've ever found: http://www.google.com/trends?q…..038;sort=0

My previous thought-process was faulty; I tested it, and it proved to be untrue.  After removing commentluv from my site, the pages that were previously performing very, very well in Google but had fallen off have now rebounded.  SE traffic improved in a matter of days, and my own preliminary data shows that commentluv was killing me.

I'd like to remind everyone that Google assumes any non-"nofollow" link to be one that you have hand-selected as having quality information.  If you approve all comments, or at least, most comments, then you are telling Google that all the people who comment on your site, regardless of their chosen link, is a quality source.  

Panda has been very effective in mauling sites that have 1 bad item on their site, and discounting every page on the site because of that 1 item.  This one item, in many cases, can be a link to a site in a "bad neighborhood," which can stem from a commentluv'd link from a comment.  Using Excel/Access, I was able to find correlation with one particular, but infrequent commenter, and I can say with 99.99% certainty that their infrequent comments were killing my site.  

There are two options: 

1) I could just let it go, and then agree with myself to study each comment's link against my data, which is very time consuming

2) I could kill commentluv.

I chose the latter.  It isn't worth the additional content, nor do I want to have to sort through each comment to determine quality of a comment's link so I'm just killed the thing.  I do feel bad for the countless Yakeziers who did comment, and I apologize that I've killed what little "linkjuice" you may have received from your comment, so I am sorry for that.  

But, I also want to warn you that commentluv may be playing a part in your rankings.  If you have hundreds or even thousands of comments, you may see more Google traffic if you kill commentluv.

Whether or not it is worth it to you is up to you.  My data showed me that commentluv isn't worth it, and that I can attribute falling ranks to it.  I think it's a great tool, but with recent SEO changes, it may not make as much sense as it used to.    As always, your mileage may vary, and I welcome everyone's input on CommentLuv.  This has made for a very interesting case study for me.

Interesting points JT.  Interested in what you think about removing the dofollow.

My commentluv updated recently and it seems it turned itself off.  I had no idea.

Post edited 6:59 pm – June 13, 2011 by JT_McGee

Suba @ Wealth Informatics said:

CommentLuv by default was nofollow. Only recently they changed it to allow the webmaster to control (dofollow all, nofollow all and dofollow only registered users are some of the options if I remember right and the default was still nofollow). And links in the comment section were always discounted by google? as the whole section was byfault nofollow unless you went out of the way to make it dofollow (I am a novice, so I might be wrong). 

 

I am NOT disagreeing with your analysis, but I have to say I am a little skeptic. If one nofollow link in the comment section could diss the site so much, how come all the sites that sell links are still doing fine? Google might catch up, but they might also be doing gazillion different things, right? How can you find out exactly 1 thing that is hurting the blog? Panda update didn't only hurt some sites but they were good to some sites as well. So the other sites which you didn't see might have come up? If I learned anything from the panda update, it is just this – it was not a one day process. Google seem to be constantly updating stuff. One day I rank higher in SERP for a specific phrase and the other day I go down for the same phrase and come up for another. I am not doing anything different, so how can this be explained?

 

As you said having any plugin is the webmasters choice. So I am not questioning your analysis (which is great, I always wanted to learn more about my traffic but never managed to do it) or about anyone wanting/removing any specific plugin. I just have an academic interest.

For the record: I had mine set to dofollow, which I had adjusted early after installing it, and long forgotten recently when I removed it.  I should have noted this–I forgot this was an option you had to tick, and even that it was an option you could tick.  This answers a lot of your questions.  All comments on my site got a dofollow.

The major realization for me was that the site as a whole had been performing poorly.  Also, where this commenter had left their link, these pages had dropped 30-40 spots to stay there as reported by webmaster tools, and my own daily tracking.  (I database all daily position changes for all my sites.  I can tell you how any of my sites ranked for keyword X on one specific day, and in 12 different geographic areas.)

I'm interested academically, too.  Criticism helps us get to the truth of the matter, which is definitely my goal.  Peer review is important in every study.  I should have mentioned that CommentLuv on my site was set to do follow.  I wish I had remembered that I could go back to nofollow.  At any rate, I'm going to leave the site as is for at least another 2 weeks to gather more data.  I've already made the switch…might as well make it worth it.

SPF made important points there.  Any time you give link love, you give link love.  Comments are discounted in their benefit to the commenters, but not in their cost to the site.  Low PR isn't really the deciding factor in quality, though, as a high or low PR is not based on authority, but links.  There are plenty of high PR sites (pharamacy sites, for example) that have a high PR, but are considered "bad neighborhoods."  In general, PR is pretty worthless.  Linkbuyers still go stupid for it, though.  Pagerank is green crack.

Pinyo said:

@JT_McGee – What's the timeframe of your observation? It may be coincidental since I have been observing changes since June 6th. Things are moving around quite a bit since then and there's a rumor of another "Panda" release coming soon.

At any rate, I think you're making a good long-term decision getting rid of CommentLuv.

 

I don't believe the rumors.   Google modifies their algorithm twice a day, on average.  Yes, they are updating what they did with Panda, but there won't be anything as major for a while.

Isn't it selfless promotion of each other?

Unfortunately, commentluv also leaves an incentive for people to take advantage and leave their links when they wouldn't otherwise come to your site. I'm not talking about fellow bloggers, like those of us here, I'm talking about those with spammy sites that do searches for sites with commentluv just to leave their links.

That's my concern.  It comes to a point where its a question of what is the best long-term decision.  I suppose I could moderate every comment and trackback (trackbacks are closed on all my posts…talk about spam) and spend hours upon hours, or I could divert a fraction of the time on a round-up, and give helpful/interesting/valuable links the attention and link weight they deserve.  Last round up I even went out of my way to link as best as I could for the benefit of the included sites' SE rankings.  That has far more value than any one comment, as far as I see it.  Maybe I'm wrong.