To encourage comments, many WordPress blogs use a Plugin call Show Top Commentators. This Plugin encourages feedback and discussion by rewarding readers for making comments. My Top Commentators are displayed on the right sidebar (under Recent Posts) along with the number of comments made in the past five days. The commentator names links back to their sites. Unlike links in the comments, the links on the Top Commentators are full links without a nofollow tag. That means the commentators gets loved by Google as well as traffic.
Looking at my Top Commentators lists, I can see that, from a SEO standpoint, three commentators are doing it right and the rest are doing it wrong. Getting a link on the Top Commentators list offers more SEO benefit than traffic benefits. It’s the same as buying a text link. The link sends you traffic but its main purpose to help you improve your Google ranking. Knowing this to be the case, then the anchor text for the top commentator link should be anything but your name (unless your name is very descriptive).
If you’re going to go after the top commentators position on a bunch of blogs, then it’s to your advantage to link back to your blog with something other than your name or blog name. Webmaster Labor is doing this correctly with Cheap Custom Content and Article Checker. Yes, he holds two spots on the Top Commentators list. Pretty evil, huh?
While it’s great to have your name on a bunch of top commentators lists, you have to keep in mind that these links are more for SEO than traffic. Ask yourself what anchor text do you want to rank for and use that as your name. You’ll still get traffic, but your Google ranking will increase.
