Cleaning Up Comment Links

Yesterday I posted about cleaning up comment links in Blogger that lead only to the blogger's profile.  The reason why you want to do this is to reduce the holes in your PR.  To explain the hole further, if you have one person that comments on your blog daily using their Blogger profile link, over the year you have 365 holes unless you have at least the equal number of comments you left with backlinks.  If you reply to each of those comments using your Blogger ID which points to your Blogger ID, creating 365 more holes.  So to combat this you would have to leave 730 comments with backlinks on blogs that are using dofollow.

When edited the HTML then checked it on my first blog, the code change worked perfectly stripping all links to Blogger profiles while retaining their avatar picture.  However,  I realized I had inadvertently always replied to comments using my Google ID of Garden Gnome which of course points to my Blogger profile.  The HTML change removed all of these links so I really tightened up holes from my blogs that can create a drain in PR.

What I also noticed is it stripped the name/url links that should have been left untouched so I need to find out how to remedy this problem.  This is not necessarily a bad thing though as you get the comments while providing an effective deterrent for comment spamming.  It gives readers what they want with an easy way to ask question and continue the communication without having to resort to email.  However, it does not reward the loyal readers with a backlink when they comment but my experience has been a good portion of readers are not concerned with building backlinks, they just want an easy way to communicate.  The link does remain if post a comment is set to open a new page,  just not on the main post page.  It does not show if the post a comment is set to embed below post. 

If you recall, earlier this year I turned off comments entirely due to comment spam.  The problem was this drastic method punished the loyal readers by not giving them an easy way to comment.  Some asked that I reconsider turning comments on again so I did.  Now this HTML edit should solve any problems but as with all major changing like this I will do a trial period.

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