It has been a while since I take blog hopping seriously until last week.  The reason for my blog hopping last week was because I joined BC Bloggers CommEx. CommEx means comment exchange. In this activity, a member is assured that his/her site will be visited by the other bloggers who registered on the CommEx form.  We have a spreadsheet to mark when we finished visiting the other sites and posting our comments. I did my best to visit all the other sites – 45 sites in all. I thought I would never finish visiting the other sites but I know I would feel embarrass if I didn’t make it.
While doing the blog hop, I noticed that bloggers implement different comment tools and security plug-ins. Some of which were really turn off for me as it prolongs the process of submitting the comment. Let me share with you my one cent which may help you increase your traffic and comments.
- Name and URL option is not enabled. Â This one is a BIGÂ turn off for me. One major reason why visitors leave comments is for the back link juice. If this option is off, the visitors would not be able to get the back link juice that they desires in exchange for their time spent staying on the site. And please if this option is disabled in your sites, don’t leave so many links on the others’ sites. That is simply NOT FAIR. Your links harm the other sites while you secured your own site.
- CAPTCHA. I understand why many bloggers use this in their comment forms and this is to prevent bot from spamming their site. But actually, this prolongs the process of submitting a comment because reading the distorted image takes time. More time is wasted if the visitor didn’t get the CAPTCHA at first try. Â As an alternative, the blog owner can moderate the submission through approval. Or if there is a Blogger widget which is similar to Confirm You Are Not A Spammer checkbox, that would be a lot better and efficient.
- The CAPTCHA appears after hitting the submit. This is another time – waster and the possibility of not completing the process of submission of comment is very high.
- Submit button is not visible. There comment forms which opens up on a popup window. I noticed that some of these forms do not render right in Google Chrome. So I have to switch to another browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer. But there are times that the form does not really render right and the submit button is not displayed. Hint, try posting a comment on your own blog as a visitor and see if your comment form renders correctly.
I’ve considered these things too so I made sure my readers and potential commenters wouldn’t need to suffer inconveniences when posting comments on my entries.. 🙂 I’ve also thought of using Disqus, but there are a few of my readers who have a hard time loading pages with Disqus so I stick to blogspot’s default commenting system for the mean time.
Uh-oh, time to review the settings on my blog, thanks for this honest feedback 🙂
Hi there! I used disqus since the comment box seems to have problem in my template. I am happy to know your feedback on my blog regarding the use of disqus.
-daddy allan (BC Blogger)
Hi sis! How do you find Disqus? 🙂
Ok lang naman, pero may ilang Disqus din na naka off ang Name/URL 🙁
im one of those who have captcha’s too, the reason for it is to discourage spammers from leaving irrelevant comments. what you say is true, it is a big turn off, i guess i need to find a better resolution to my spam problems 🙂