Here we go again taking a deeper look in one of WordPress most powerful plugins called CommentLuv to especially focus the potential issue of broken links over time. An aging Internet blog faces this general issue on how to clean-up old links that might brake and result in a 404 Not Found page. For search engines like Google, broken links can be an issue for seo (Search Engine Optimization) and post ranking in search engine result pages (SERP) if not maintained continuously. It’s simply a matter of trust for Google when they see many dead links pointing from your blog to external 404 pages.
What is CommentLuv?
CommentLuv is a WordPress plugin which is known for its community building features. The concept of CommentLuv and its developer Andy Bailey is to encourage blog users and daily readers to actively comment on blog posts. CommentLuv rewards users with a link in return for leaving a comment. This is fairly a give and take approach by sharing community success and building a strong user base that will continuously comment on your future blog posts as well.
What CommentLuv does is to let the user who enters a comment choose to include their last published post:
Benefits of CommentLuv
If configured properly, CommentLuv is a great opportunity for webmasters to receive increasing blog traffic to new posts by participating users in promoting their latest posts with a link and further details on the author and their blogging history.
An active community with many topic related comments below each blog post are a great indicator for online reputation and strong user base. Search engines will see users actively commenting on posts and benefit articles with improved rankings in search engine results. Combining CommentLuv with social media channels will increase this effect by attracting more people daily.
The user comment post link attached to a comment:
The Problem with Broken Links
Webmaters and blog owners are responsible for their content and links pointing to external pages. Google clearly states to mark external links as nofollow if they are not related to the blog and article topic. Ok, so this is pretty simple to understand. We generally want to have topic related blogs and posts linked together. With every aging link on a website, chances increase that linked pages are not available anymore after time due to technical issues or planned relocated of content.
After reactivating CommentLuv on Tech Crates, the broken link checker notified many dead links which are redirected now to other pages or return 404 Page Not Found exceptions.
CommentLuv Broken Link Cleaner
Debugging into this issue of how to fix broken links brought me to the developer and support forum where Andy Bailey programmed another plugin to take care of this behaviour. The Comment Luv Link Cleaner lets you automatically search and list all links included with CommentLuv in your WordPress comments.
Links can be checked and validated on the fly displaying them in configurable pages with e.g. 500 links per page. The automation feature checks all link periodically providing maintanance features for cleaning dead legacy links that might be years old already.
Removing Dead Links
The CommentLuv Link Cleaner pluging tests and removes dead links easily. Dead links are marked clearly visible with a red 404 label and can be removed though the 404 result page list. This is obviously much easier than checking thousands of comment links manually again and again.
Broken links are a common thing on the Internet and no link will work forever. For a blog owner, removing broken links is part of daily blog maintenance process. Content is King – and the comment part is important of a post as it directly shows the user feedback or none at all! Google does not index each comment, but crawles them for SERP analyzing purposes. Therefore also comments should be highly related to the post topic. Comment and link spam must be avoided and removed as soon as noticed in any case to protect your online reputation.
What do you think about CommentLuv? Share the community spirit and let us know by leaving a comment. Thank you guys!