Due to the recent popularity of WordPress Plugins such as Nofollow Free or Top Commentators, more commentators are using keywords instead of their name in order to increase their Google ranking for the specified keywords. Do you find that annoying?
I must admit that I prefer answering “Alex” instead of “San Diego Real Estate”. But as I previously said, having the “Top Commentators” and the “Nofollow Free” plugins enabled are good for your traffic. So, is there a solution?
Happily, the answer is yes. Stephen Cronin have created the Keyword Luv plugin, which allow the commentator to specify both his name and his keywords. For example, my initials are “jbj” and related keywords to my blog should be “Web Development” or “WordPress”. Instead of typing “Web development” as my name, I’ll type “jbj@Web Development”.
Here is the result:
Installing Keyword Luv
Nothing hard here: First, download the plugin, extract it and upload the directory on your server, under the wp-content/plugins directory. Then, login to your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins and activate the plugin.
That’s all! Enjoy you “keywords free” comments!
Jean-Baptiste Jung
Jean-Baptiste Jung is a 27 years old blogger/web developper/web designer who lives in the French-Speaking part of Belgium. Jean-Baptiste maintains two blogs: Cats Who Code where he and other authors write about Web Development, Web design, Blogging tips and WordPress, and WpRecipes where Jean shares useful WordPress snippets on a daily basis. When he's not blogging or having fun with codes, Jean loves to spend time with his wife and cat, and travelling everywhere he can.
Nice share.thanks 
I too have quite recently started using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv and I have noticed a big difference in the number ...
No Way! That sounds like a great membership! It is definately a nice opportunity. 
Wordpress is a powerful tool not just for blogs, but also for different news sites. Using some customization and hacks ...
This was what I needed. I didn't have to search more than 2 links to find everything all on your ...
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That is a simply brilliant plugin. As you can see I am using my keyword for my site here. I use it on all the sites I like to visit.
@ JBJ – Very interesting post Jean. I don’t have a problem with people using anchor text (keywords) as their name, but I’ve often found myself deleting comments that have anchor text and don’t have value. Things like “great post!” and such which don’t add an value to the conversation.
I may consider using this on one of my low traffic sites for awhile and if it helps, install it here as well. Thanks for the heads up on this!
Jean, great focus on this awesome plugin. I have used this plugin for a long time now in my blog and the post on it has become one of the most commented posts as well. Stephen has done a great job with it.
Make no mistake, I love giving my readers some link love especially when they leave meaningful comments that add to the discussion. I do however have started to wonder in terms of SEO. As I mentioned this post on CommentLuv & KeywordLuv has all kinds of keywords in the 120+ comments. And the keywords are all from different niche.
Would this affect the page’s pagerank eventually? How would this affect the site in whole with so many different outgoing links with so many keywords? I have sounded this off elsewhere but haven’t really heard about the SEO aspects of it.
Would love to see a discussion on this.
Oh, and RT of Untwisted vortex maintains a list of blogs that use CommentLuv and KeyWordLuv. So ask to add yours to the list if you use this great plugin.
@ K – All comments will have the nofollow tag, making it virtually irrelevant from an SEO standpoint, unless of course you are using a dofollow plugin (or something similar).
From the commentators standpoint, it shouldn’t matter, though ideally they will want their comments to appear on “similar” topics that are relevant to their blog. An inbound link from an irrelevant site is not going to hold much if any SEO value. For example, one inbound link from a relevant PR4 site in your niche is worth more than 100 inbound links from a PR2 site, etc.
From the bloggers standpoint, however, having a blog that jumps all over the place to a variety of topics can be hard on search engines as they try to figure out what exactly your blog is about. It will get a low authority ranking on a variety of topics, instead of a high authority ranking on 1-2 keywords.
I usually recommend bloggers who spend a lot of time talking about an “off topic” subject to break it off into a separate blog. You may remember that was how WPHacks.com (HackWordPress.com) was started.
Kyle, thanks for that awesome reply. I have removed nofollow from my comments and exactly the reason why I wonder about it’s possible ill-effects on my blog due to the outgoing links.
Thanks for the comments, I’m glad you found Stephen’s plugin useful!
@K: I have dofollow on all my blogs, and I never been penalized by Google. Though, I heard people complaining about this.
Hi Everyone.
First, Jean-Baptiste, thanks for writing about the plugin. Much appreciated! Can I just say that everyone reading this should get over to WPVote (Jean-Baptiste’s social news site for WordPress) and get behind it.
Kyle, congratulations on this site, I keep hearing about you on the WordPress Weekly Podcast…
K, thanks for the support. I’m going to take a moment to answer some of your concerns:
Kyle’s pretty much spot on with what he says about links being more useful if they’re from relevent sites, but I’d add that using your keywords on a non relevant site is better than not using them. Every little bit helps.
A lot of what KeywordLuv does (when used with a dofollow plugin) goes against ‘good SEO’, but when I look at the traffic Google sends me, it can’t be that bad. Over the last year it’s slowly steadily increased, which is to be expected, given more content and more authority, but the introduction of KeywordLuv didn’t have any effect on that trend.
Not sure if this will work, but here’s a screen shot from Google Analytics of traffic sent to my blog by Google Search over the last year:
Anyway, I’ll leave it here and answer in more depth soon – I’m still writing that post on KeywordLuv and SEO I promised you.
Okay, the image got stripped, but you can see it at:
http://www.scratch99.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/google-search-traffic-small.png
I include both for personality and branding at the same time. But it does kinda suck when people leave their name as a company or keyword only name.
I mean, your blog isn’t an advertising board, it’s a place for discussion among people.
Funny how my comment was used in this example!
I installed the Keyword Luv plug-in on our real estate blog in San Diego and it really has been interesting to see and track some of the comments. I think that you have to be careful with spam but you also get a lot more participation in your blog and it gets other people involved who might not have participated in the past. I think the plug-in has been a big success.
So how come you aren’t using KeywordLuv on your post about KeywordLuv?
@ Barton – This was a guest post, so the author didn’t have control over whether or not the plugin is used here.
Also, if we used every WordPress plugin we review here, well, this site would be extremely slow.
That doesn’t mean we won’t eventually use this plugin, or a similar one, just saying…
Thats grt, Thanks for the info. Hope you bring such useful info for us in future also
Thanks again.
Thanks for the ‘LUV’. I just heard about Keyword luv a couple of days ago. Thanks a lot for doing this for us. I hope the movement keeps growing.
Share the LUV everybody!
I Luv this plugin.
I Do Follow and Luv on my site as well.
Thanks for your suggestion.
Rudy
Great plugin been looking for something like this for a while.
Thanks…Great plug in..keep sharing
Thank you for sharing this interesting plugin, I am definite that this will revolutionize the way people comment in the future.
This is a great tool for bloggers…all thou it gets difficult to find such blogs that have keywordluv or commentluv enabled. Great way to generate backlinks!
What annoys me more than anything else about KeywordLuv is the fact that it seem to attract more spammer than I can or want to deal with.
Personally, I don’t let keywords in comments annoy me. I just consider them spam and delete. But you are right about KeywordLuv, it does help in the situation.
Nice list, many thanks! KeywordLuv definitely helps the blogging community.
It’s not really hard to stay on topic with the comments. It really helps both people. Content for links, Keywordluv and commentluv really help bloggers and the whole internet community.
with plugins like keywordluv, that is why wordpress is far superior to blogger blogs and other blog platforms!
Hi, I noticed that you have KeywordLuv installed on your blog. This is a great plugin! I have installed it on my blog as well. So far the results have been amazing, although there are a few people out there(blackhatters) who have chosen to use this plugin for evil. But overall, it is one of the best plugins I have installed on my blog thus far! I look forward to reading more from you in the future!
This plug in is really amazing. I have it installed on my blog also and it’s a really good way for all bloggers to help each other.
I installed keyword luv into one of my blogs and traffic has increased i will upgrade my other blogs soon
I have added comment and keyword luv to all of my blogs after seeing great results from the first site I tried it on. It is a bit of work to monitor the comments but it is well worth it for the links. With aksimat installed it does keep most of the spam comments at bay too.
This is an interesting idea for a plugin to get more comments.
I have found that since adding keywordluv and commentluv to my sites that I am getting far more interaction from the people that visit my site. People will usually go searching for other sites that have keywordluv inorder to leave valuable comments that go towards adding fresh content.
Thank you for the chance to add a comment to your site.
Jenny
I just installed KeywordLuv to my blog and I’m really excited about the prospect of getting more interaction on my blog.
I too have quite recently started using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv and I have noticed a big difference in the number of comments I am getting. However, I am also getting a whole lot more spam which is terribly annoying. Does anyone have a solution for that?