Recently I started to comment more than usual on English blogs and one thing I noticed is that Comment Luv is more common internationally than it’s in Sweden were I’ve been working so far. This plugin is actually great since it will give you a static deeplink to your latest entry, which may be difficult to get from other sources.
Unfortunately I also see a lot of people getting links to Feedburner in their Comment Luv instead of getting a link directly to their site.
Feedburner offers a lot of extra features for your RSS-feed, including support for RSS via mail, and therefore there’s a lot of people using it. I encourage everyone to do so, but you need to change settings so Feedburner doesn’t get credit for your backlinks from Comment Luv instead of you!
How to redirect Feedburner to your site
It’s actually real simple and you can do the whole process within a minute.
- Login to your Feedburner account
- Press Analyze
- Press Configure Stats, in your bottom left hand corner
- Uncheck all of the checkboxes and save
Now all the links will go directly to you instead of Feedburner.
Spread the word
If you visit a regular blog with about 30 comments on a post you’ll se that several of them still give their linkpower to Feedburner instead of taking advantage of it for themselves.
Therefore I would appreciate if you helped me spreading the word about it.
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This is an AWESOME tip Stefan.
I believe a lot of feedburner’s users are not aware of this including me.
Thanks Roseli, I’m glad to hear. I’ve seen many doing this mistake and it’s almost like only getting half your paycheck. Hopefully this will spread so more will be aware of it.
Ha! I did not know this.
This article needs to be spread around, you should stumble it or submit it to Digg.
Unnecessary and wrong – FeedBurner and similar services (such as FeedBlitz) use the correct redirect code (301 moved permanently) to ensure that your link gets the credit from search engines. Clicking tracking off loses you a great deal of intelligence and you’re not losing benefit of getting links back to the source article.
Last part of last sentence might be confusing – what I mean to say is that with tracking ON you are NOT losing search engine link juice. With tracking off you lose stats and gain nothing.
Do you truly lose something? Even though I’ve been using Feedburner for several years, I’ve never used their stats. What happens to all of your redirects if your Feedburner account gets removed or Feedburner closes down?
There’s no point in doing this for backlinks because all links created by the commentluv are nofollow. So this will not help you with SEO.
To be honest, you are wrong. There’s plenty of blogs using Comment Luv without nofollow.
I thought for sure that I was going to need to make these changes but it turns out my boxes were already unchecked.
Thanks for this great tip! The word should be spread on this one!
Cheers
Sandep
Interesting to know. I like my stats for my Feedburner so I can determine which posts my readers like.
I usually use a combination of Google Analytics and looking at the number of posts to see what’s popular. But Feedburner may be usefull for that purpose.
Its very nice tip, i was searching for the solution to this. But i was not aware that it will be so easy !!
Thanks a lot.
Hey Stefan, I never know about this before until I checked mine just now. I’ve 2 checkbox are checked, anyway I have unchecked all of them now. Thanks for telling me.
But I thought the blog which installed nofollow plugin will not follow the commentluv link as well? So it doesn’t help even though the link points to us?
Regards,
Lee
You are correct that if the blog is nofollow, you will not gain any linkpower from the Comment Luv-link. On the other hand you will still gain visitors. There’s still plenty of blogs with dofollow and there you will gain linkpower. Personally I think we will see more of them in the future.
That’s interesting … I didn’t know that. Of course, I always support the idea of leaving comments because you want to leave a comment or meet someone new, and not to just comment all over the place only for the links or for Page Rank. But at the same time … I can understand that it does seem silly for the link to go through Feedburner if it doesn’t have to!
I think I had noticed this before and did a double-take but then never had time to figure it out.
You are right Anna, it’s important to write valuable comments and just not leave a short “nice post”.
I see this a lot on my sites as well, it’s a shame to go to the work of finding a site that will give you deep links and then find they are all going back to feedburner. I used to shoot a message to anyone who commented on one of my sites where I saw this happening, but I don’t have time to keep up with every one of them now so I just let it go.
Since I’m not using Comment Luv on this site it’s not really a method for me, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to contact your visitors and tell them what to change? By doing so your visitor most certainly will visit you again and be grateful.
Yikes! Thanks for the tip. I didn’t realize this could happen. I don’t use Comment Luv on my site, but I’m seeing it more and more elsewhere.
Oh snap! Thanks dude! I didn’t even realize that man! I wondered why those links looked funny! I came over from Anna’ s site, and I definitely changed my settings!
I’m glad to see you here Joe.
Good point, just setting up mine now my my new SEO blog. Don’t forget to try and link back to your site too – otherwise you will get no backlinks from the syndication.