In order to give something back to those who take the time to leave comments here, I’ve installed the brilliant little plugin CommentLuv.
What does this mean for you? Well, unless you are a blogger or have some other website which produces a syndication feed, nothing (sorry).
However, if you are the proud owner of a site (such as a blog) which makes available your latest posts via a syndication feed, then you will gain a completely free deep link ((A link to an individual page of your site, rather than simply to your home page.)) to your site!
The CommentLuv plugin will do its best to auto-discover your feed based upon the address submitted in the form while commenting; however, if you want to ensure that your feed is discovered, you can include it manually within your comment. Example:
This is an example comment. It will contain quality feedback and not lame “First post!” nonsense or other rubbish. ((Why will it be a quality comment? Because my readers rock, that’s why!)) And so on. And so on. But I also want to make sure CommentLuv can find my feed, so I’m going to add this to my comment: [feed]http://www.example.com/feed/[/feed]
That’s it! The magic is in the [feed] tag; simply enclose the address to your feed in those tags, and CommentLuv will attempt to discover your latest entry based upon it.
And if all goes well, your comment will be posted, with the added bonus of including a nice, shiny link back to a page on your site. Delightful, no?
I still reserve the right to delete comments if they look suspiciously spammy. Having a huge number of comments means nothing to me if the quality of the comments is poor — and I certainly don’t want to risk being flagged by Google because of spam-ish comments. So, just use your head when you comment, and you’ll be fine.
And enjoy the extra backlinks to your site! :-)
(And if you want to see CommentLuv in action, the first reader to benefit from it was Gordan commenting on my Genesis 1:4 post!)
Why will it be a quality comment? Because my readers rock, that’s why!
Go on. Deny every vice of human laziness, ignore that it’s coupled with the Internet. Continue to believe in the ability of your readers to produce intelligent comments. :P
Umm. Do these back-links produce a link to a relevant page on the site? Or just ‘latest from?’. Will enclosing a link to a relevant page on our site in the feed tags produce the same thing? Or does that become spam?
Hi Rick,
Michael from Germany here.
Thums up. I simply love CommentLuv ..*-)
Oh, and great theme …*-)
I use it myself on two blogs. On one i replace the rotating headers with a video wall.
For the other one i still look for some photos or pics with the right size to use. Where did you find yours? They look real nice
Keep the good work up …*-)
Michael
Latest from Michael: Full or Partial Feeds? Or Headlines only?
Michael — Thanks for stopping by Kingdom Front! To answer your question, I’m using cropped portions of wallpapers made by the incomparable Vladstudio, with his permission.
Also, I should point out that you are using FeedBurner’s link tracking tool (or click tracking or whatever it is); the link to your content that CommentLuv see is a FeedBurner redirect link — users clicking the link will arrive at your content, but search engines may very well credit the link to FeedBurner rather than to your content. For more info, check out “Turn off FeedBurner Redirects in RSS Feeds from shankri-la.
Brandon — My readers (at least the ones I can rule out as being scripted bots) haven’t let me down yet. ;-)
CommentLuv only returns a link to the latest post on a site — see the previous comment by Michael, for example. The
[feed]tags will only work with links to an RSS feed. That, of course, means that if only one category of a blog is relevant to this site, you could include that category’s feed, for example[feed]http://example.com/category/theology/feed/[/feed].I suppose it is possible that if a post fills up with dozens or hundreds of comments (’cause that happens so often around here!), the variety of likely irrelevant links may dilute the authority of this page in search engines… but, I’m not terribly worried about such things, and the benefit to my readers outweighs any consequences on my part.
I see. That is really quite cool, and actually rather generous and self-sacrificing as well. /me applauds. Now to try this again… maybe this time I will get it right. :P Do I actually have to type in ‘latest from me’ when using the feed tags or is that provided by CommentLuv?
Latest from Brandon: Overcoming: The Craving
Thanks for writing your review on commentluv. this looks like a really cool tool!
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