CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that promises to increase comments and social engagement on your website. There is a free version and an ehanced premium version which starts from $67. If you read blogs regularly, you will probably have seen it before. The free version of the plugin has been downloaded around 677,000 times and I have seen many people using the premium version too.
The plugin aims to reward commenters by automatically placing a link to their latest blog post directly after their comment. This encourages more people to leave a comment on your blog. The premium version has additional features such as letting commenters who tweet your post link to any blog post they like.
I have no intentions of installing CommentLuv on any of my blogs. There are many reasons why most top blogs are not using CommentLuv. Today, I would like to explain my own reasons for not implementing the plugin on my websites.
1. Quality is More Important Than Quantity
CommentLuv has proved that it can help you attract more commenters, however it does not attract good commenters. Many of the people who leave comments will not even read your article. They will simply scan it quickly and then leave a comment that does not look too spammy.
This means that a high percentage of comments on CommentLuv are irrelevant. Many commenters publish a generic comment that can be left on any blog. Is this the type of comment you want for your blog?
It is much better to have 5 good comments than 25 poor ones. I value comments highly though the quality of comments should always take precedence over quantity.
2. It Can Hurt Discussions
Sometimes the discussion that arises from a blog post is better than the blog post itself. If most comments are from people who are leaving short and/or irrelevant comments, good commenters may be scared away.
Imagine the flow of a discussion in the comment area:
- Good Comment
- Great Comment
- Good Comment
- Good Comment
Good comments left by readers can encourage others to leave a comment too. Bad comments do the opposite. Now imagine a discussion that was littered with bad comments:
- Bad Comment
- Great Comment
- Bad Comment
- Irrelevant Comment
You can see how a pattern of poor comments could hurt a good discussion developing. If one of your readers scans through comments and sees lots of poorly written irrelevant comments, they may be discouraged from leaving a comment of their own.
3. CommentLuv Commenters Do Not Care About You or Your Website
I realise that there are people out there who do leave good comments on CommentLuv enabled websites. Unfortunately, a very high percentage of commenters are only leaving comment in the hope of getting some SEO juice and a little traffic. Search for “CommentLuv Enabled Blogs” online and you will find many bloggers sharing lists of what blogs are using CommentLuv. If you check out the comment area on those posts, you will find people sharing their strategy of getting free traffic through CommentLuv.
Two of my favourite blogging blogs, FamousBloggers and BasicBlogTips, use CommentLuv. I published an article on Basic Blog Tips entitled “Recognize the Value of Your Blog and Your Self Worth“. The article focused on the fact that you can be passionate about blogging and make money through it. A lot of the people who replied to my article left good comments however there were a lot of comments from people who left a comment who clearly did not read my article. Their comments said that they agreed with me and that we should not try and earn money through blogging; which was the complete opposite of what I said in the article. This made it clear that those people simply scanned the article quickly and then left an irrelevant comment.
These type of people aren’t interested in what you are saying and are only looking for a link back to their blog. Once they have published a quick comment on your blog and linked back to their own blog, they will leave. Why do you want to attract people like that? Why do you want to reward them with a link?
On a side note, you will find that most of the websites that share CommentLuv lists do not link to the websites on the list as they are worried about losing SEO juice and traffic. I don’t know where to begin with how wrong that is! ;)
Overview
CommentLuv users generally tend to be inexperienced. If you are a blog owner, I would discourage you from installing CommentLuv as it attracts poor quality comments to your blog.
I would also discourage you from trying to promote your blog by spending time searching for CommentLuv blogs to leave a comment. All search engines place an emphasis on the quality of the website that is linking to you. A natural link from an authority blog is worth more to yfour SEO rankings than 100 links in the comment area. It is one of the worst ways you can spend your time marketing a website.
I am not trying to discourage you from leaving comments on blogs. Far from it. However, you should leave a comment in the hope of someone clicking your website link. Take the time to write a good comment and the owner of the blog, and other commenters, will want to find out more about you.
Good luck,
Kevin
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Hi James.
I’m not sure exactly what is going on there. Drop by Rise Forums and explain the issue in full as we have a lot of members who are more clued up in SEO issues than myself. You can share screenshots that may help illustrate the issue too.
Kevin
Sorry about those typos by the way. Well, you have a edit button also.
I totally read your post because I am trying to decide whether to use comment luv or not, but since I am on the wrong hosting platform, nothing is changing until I get it on managed WordPress on Linux.
Comment luv could easily overwhelm being on Windows Plesk and running WordPress on it. Long story, so I won’t tell you how that happened.
I still haven’t decided because something is effecting my domain authority on a pretty new blog where I quickly coming up against others and its not the age of the site or the backlink and referring domains.
The only real difference I can see is they write very short and often, where I write only when passionate, which is seldom, then in-between new post go back and clean up those old ones better as I improve. The other factor which may be effecting it, but I don’t know, is they optimize to the point they barely approve any comments at all and only very short ones when they do. I approve every comment if it is not spam or troll. If its to long or goes to far off topic, I have a edit button.
Since DA is primarily age of site, site density and popularity, what they are they really using to gauge popularity? Since a like button is easy to click, and reading a few articles in full and typing in a fairly long comment on each takes a level of endeavor you could almost be writing a post. So can they be looking at comment sections as a significant factor on popularity?
No problem Raspal. Hope removing it works out well for you :)
Hi Kevin :-)
You won’t remember me, but I do, from one of your posts at BAFB during the 28 days’ contest.
I landed on this post through Google, searching for, and reading many posts about comment luv. I have it installed since I started blogging last October. I don’t receive many comments and hardly any spam each week (about 10 spam comments a week, which hardly takes a minute to scan through and delete).
I Googled this topic when I happened to read why a top Indian blogger, Harsh Agrawal, removed commentluv from his blog – ShoutMeLoud.
Before reading your post, I’ve read some posts which speak the opposite. But as one of the commenters said above, I’ll also remove this plugin and test for a few months.
If anyone reading this post has removed this plugin, they must have noticed that old/existing comments still keep their commentluv, the links that is. Just read a post on how to remove the links from existing comments here. Maybe useful to someone reading this post. But, be careful as you will be manually modifying your mysql tables.
I also agree, valuable comments left on blogs automatically make other users and the blogger check your blog.
Thank you for this post, Kevin!
Hi Kavin,
Thanks for sharing the facts associated with CommentLuv with utmost clarity & honesty.
Because for some times I was also thinking to install CommentLuv in my blog as the number of comments I am getting is very low. So I have searched over the internet regarding different advantages and disadvantages of commenting systems. But after reading your article my mind has changed. You are right. Even I also think that If any comment doesn’t add any value then what is the benefit of that.
I agree. I appreciate that people have gained traffic through leaving comments, however I’d rather spend my time writing content for my own blog instead of submitting dozens of comments every day. As you rightly point out, there is no long term benefit from being an active commenter, particularly as the website owner can stop using the plugin at any time.
Many bloggers are well aware about the fact that outbound do-follow links steal their rankings. Recently it has been noticed that no-follow links are also considered by Google, so bloggers are dropping CommentLuv from their blogs.
If you manage to find some CommentLuv enabled blogs, still keep this fact in your mind that these blogs are using CommentLuv for just driving some commentators and they will quit using CommentLuv sooner or later. When they will quit using the plugin, you will loss all the links which you had built there.
I think most people have seen the same results as you. Very few bloggers seem to keep using CommentLuv long term. They always seem to move on and focus more on quality.
I don’t approve any comment that even remotely smells like spam. Interesting article – For a while, I did have comment luv installed on my site, but later I disabled it. I did notice a small bump in spammy type comments as you mentioned – and I 100% agree that can be hazard – but on top of that, the other problem I saw was that people left links that sometimes would set off the virus software that people had. Comment Luv can make your site look hazardous to some virus programs! Like you Kevin, I just want good, clean, wholesome quality comments about my content – and actually, I’d rather have great comments and lower traffic than astounding traffic numbers but no comments.
Thanks! (Sorry for the ramble).
Hey Kevin,
When you get a chance stop by and read the post I just published. :)
Hi Dean,
I feel that rewarding commenters with links is always negative; be it with a link in every comment using CommentLuv or with a top commentator list. The top list creates a similar problem. You will find lots of people leaving comments trying to break into the top ten and get a dofollow link. This leads to more pointless comments and more time for you deleting them or moving them to the spam bin.
I’d prefer to have zero comments on an article than a “Thanks. Great work” type comment that was only left because the person wanted a link.
You will undoubtedly see less comments when you switch CommentLuv, though the quality of your comments is going to rise. I have no doubt of that.
:)
Kevin
Good timing. I just dropped by your post and left a comment. :)
Hi Kevin,
I know exactly what you mean. I installed CommentLuv in the hope of enticing more comments and although this happened, most of them end up in my spam bin because they had nothing to do with what the article was about or it was something generic like “nice post”.
On June 1st I am going to remove the plugin for a month and see what happens, I “reward” commentators with a top commentator list so hopefully the decrease won’t be that noticeable..