Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people?

I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves.

When big name Blogger X loses a lot of credibility by saying remove the nofollow from your comments, but doesn’t do it themselves. I am taking a stand. Nofollow is gone from all my comments as of now. I am not stupid enough to not moderate my comments, but I am going totally nofollow free in the comments. This is step one. I recommend the nofollow free plugin for WordPress. I also recommend using the nofollow from home and nofollow those dupes to keep Google juice flowing the right direction from there.

Secondly give back to your commentators. I not only have I made the link to their blog nofollow free, but using CommentLuv and KeywordLuv the link to their last post is nofollow free. This will pass along some serious Google juice when you are indexed.

The third thing I am doing is providing subscribe to comments by email. Your commentators will know when someone else posts a follow up comment. Last but not least I am using Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. Commentators will be able to respond to each other. If you run a political or religiously minded blog you will probably want to be careful how many levels deep you let that one run though.

Lastly I intend to do a better job than most of the big guys when it comes to interacting with you. This is another area you see top name blogging gurus telling you to be social but never have anything to do with the people commenting on their own blogs. I can promise you this if you comment and leave your site I will at the very least give your site a visit, which usually will translate into an ad click or comment of my own if your subject interests me. Also be sure to check out the weekly CommentLuv Link List posted every Friday at Blogging For Noobs.

One of the best tools I have found of recent to help improve our blogging is the ScribeFire extension for the Firefox browser. It allows you to automatically post to your blog while surfing. It works for self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com TypePad.com LiveJournal.com, and a few others. My hopes were dashed that it wouldn’t recognize MySpace, but that was just too much to really hope for. MySpace wants you on site or not at all, and frankly that is just too damned big of time waste for me right now. It is a good resource to try and tap, but at this point I don’t have the time to repost everything to MySpace on top of trying to write content, upgrading my themes, editing my novel, etc. The next great thing about ScribeFire is it will allow me to switch between blog accounts easily something I can’t do when I use to blog the things I Digg. It will also allow you to post in draft mode so you can use all the fancy Meta tools I am sure I will get around to preaching on later this week.

The next great Firefox blogging tool is a custom hack of the main CSS file ( usercontent.css ) which decides how things will look while browsing. Search Engine Genie shows you how to highlight any rel=nofollow links. Why is this important? As a blogger if you comment or pay for your link to be hosted somewhere that that has a rel=nofollow added to the link search engines will ignore you and not follow the link back to your site. There are many reasons to be both a do follow and a no follow blogger, but those are for another lesson. To get your name and site indexed, I would suggest posting relevant comments on any of the blogs I have listed in my D-List

If you get the coding done right it should look something like this
Google Search

You can mass around with it by using your own coded file with this link <a href=”http://www.google.com” rel=”nofollow”>Google Search</a>