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Article Writing & Marketing Insights

Article Comments Trend

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About (3) weeks ago we abolished the “Registered Commentor” system for those who wanted to leave comments on any article and replaced it with a simple CAPTCHA code to authenticate the commentor as a human rather than a spamming machine.

For 2006, in January we had 117 comments, February 148 comments, March 190 comments, and this month… 464 comments sent in so far!

Lesson learned: Open system with CAPTCHA authentication allows 150% improvement in article comments vs. restricted commenting to registered commentors in a private system.

Here’s how to comment on any of the more than 150k+ articles in EzineArticles.com’s database:

Go to http://EzineArticles.com/ and find an article about something of personal or business interest you want to comment on.
Click on the “Comments” link directly under the TITLE of the article.
Add your Comment
Enter the CAPTCHA code to authenticate you are a human
Within a business day or so, your comment will be reviewed by a human editor that is part of our comment management team.
You will receive an email after your comment is approved.

It’s that simple!

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on April 28, 2006 at 8:02 am

Views 1,103 |

14 Comments »

Michael Russell writes:

and your comment is?

Comment provided April 28, 2006 at 9:10 am

Ed Howes writes:

Because I am legally blind, I use a black screen and light text, reverse field. If the Captcha caracters were all bright, I would have no problem but the pastels require me to bring up my digital magnifier at about 6X. That usually works. When it doesn’t I guess, submit and do over about half the time. The third attemt is rare and about one in five times I can read all characters with my semi functional eye, unassisted. But my commenting has nothing to do with the change in the system. The old one probably would have been better for me. I am commenting because I see tremendous benefits for all members in doing a lot more of it. Yesterday, I read a few articles on subjects of interest to me, so loaded with keywords, the article was unreadable. I informed the author I would not be reading any more of their articles, visiting their web site, or doing any business with them. Do you suppose that comment will make any difference? But I’m not done. This problem gives me food for an article. I have a blank document with the title on my desktop this morning. My point is, the bad practices of fellow authors can inspire creativity as readily as an inspirational article. The benefits of leaving comments is also food for an article that might inspire more of us to validate each other’s work. I’ve been leaving comments since the 22nd or 23rd of April and have yet to be notified of a posting. On the assumption the comment review staff is on vacation or laid off, I will continue writing them, though with greater discrimination, than yesterday. :-)
One more thing. I have been commenting on this blog since last week-end also. So I have been checking for new comments two or three times per day. 23K authors, and 2 -9 blog comments. Is this resource underutilized or what? What is a typical ratio of views to comments on this blog?

Comment provided April 28, 2006 at 10:23 am

Ed Howes writes:

P.S. Thanks for sharing these numbers Chris. Comparing April count to the average of the previous three months and we have better than a 200% increase. Well done thou good and faithful servants.

Comment provided April 28, 2006 at 10:30 am

Arthur Levine writes:

As a writer of articles about faith and inspiration I find this new program to allow comments on existing articles to be a terrific idea. It should encourage more traffic

Comment provided May 1, 2006 at 2:24 pm

Carole McMichaels writes:

EzineArticles is a sterling example of how to run a business. Your courteous helpfulness, creativity, and responsiveness are wonderful examples for all of us to emulate, whether we’re in business as oldies or newbies.

Comment provided May 1, 2006 at 3:35 pm

Tony Wilton writes:

Thanks Chris

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on relevant articles.

The link provided back to our own site should serve to enhance our visibility on this crowded Web and hopefully lead to some more targetted traffic.

Cheers
Tony

Comment provided May 1, 2006 at 7:54 pm

Doreen Gayer writes:

I really appreciate this new feature to your ezine! I am interested in networking with others online & have found leaving comments on blogs a very interactive way of doing it.

I also participate in forums but find the one on one to leaving a comment is a real relationship builder.

Comment provided May 1, 2006 at 10:12 pm

Keith Bateup writes:

I am not 100% sure this is a good idea. While it is good news that there is a new way to link build, I feel that this will be abused by those black hat SEOers. By removing the rel=nofollow from links on comments and allowing all users to leave comments I think that this will subtract value from the link in the article and give people less of an incentive to actually write articles, when they can get a one way link of equal value by leaving a short comment.

I hope this doesn’t happen, but I fear this will

Comment provided May 2, 2006 at 3:18 am

Chris Knight writes:

Keith,

You’ve got it backwards. :) The rel=nofollow tag is added to the COMMENTS links, not the ARTICLE links.

Therefore authors get a high value link and commentors get an active link with the rel=nofollow for now. The commentors still get relevant traffic for their link and they get an opportunity to participate in the discussion of the article they are commenting on and commentors get a chance to get the attention of the author who will most likely read their comments.

Comment provided May 2, 2006 at 6:31 am

Helen Wilkie writes:

What is rel=no follow and what does it do?

Comment provided May 2, 2006 at 6:16 pm

Chris Knight writes:

rel=”nofollow” —

Anytime a rel=”nofollow is added to an href statement, it means the search engine crawlers will NOT follow the link, thereby reducing the reward to the original owner of the link.

Here is its use:–
<a href=”http://your-company-name.com” rel=”nofollow”>Visit My Page</a>

– We are not going to use it for the author resource box and we require in the publisher TOS that articles reprinted from EzineArticles.com site are not allowed to use the nofollow attribute. At this point, we are only using it on the ARTICLE COMMENTS, but are not using it on the BLOG comments. The BLOG comments are 95% ok, whereas the article comments have quite a volume of self promotion — that would explode even higher with trash article comments if we allowed a link without the nofollow tag.

Comment provided May 2, 2006 at 8:56 pm

Rick Vidallon writes:

Would it be possible to receive a notification email that a comment has been posted to an article? I think this would be a nice interactive feature.

Comment provided May 5, 2006 at 8:42 am