My Apologies to the Top Commentors

Around the beginning of last year I installed the Top Commentors plugin on this blog. At first I was extremely excited thinking it was a great way to reward commentors. After running it for a while it has become painfully obvious that peoples are only using it to increase their search engine rankings for keyword rich text links.

In theory the plugin is fantastic. The people who comment the most on your posts get a link on the sidebar, or where ever you place the PHP. The link is not rel="nofollow" ed, so it’s more beneficial (for rankings) than the regular comment links that do have the nofollow attribute on them.

Ideally people would use their real name so that you could actually start to form a relationship and community on your blog. Sadly that never happened. It’s almost impossible to establish a relationship with your keyword.

So at the end of the day, I decided to remove the plugin because I felt it was bringing down the quality of commentors and links.

Sorry to all the good commentors that had to get penalized for A LOT of bad apples.