Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Comments after switching to WordPress

I have notices something interesting after making the switch to WordPress.  Many of my older posts are now being commented on with a higher frequency than they were with LifeType.  I think that there are some potential reasons for this

  1. LifeType had a Bayesian spam filter.  It is possible that it was trained poorly over time, so these comments were marked as spam and deleted immediately

  2. There could have been a bug in the other spam filters, which would have deleted those comments.

  3. Since I am submitting a new sitemap for the WordPress blog, the posts could see "fresher" and could appear higher in search results.

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, I noticed that my older posts get a fair number of comments as well. I'm pretty convinced that it's the Google Sitemap that makes the difference. When WordPress generates the sitemap, it sets the "relevance" of the post based on the number of comments for that post. I also think that Google gives higher page rank for things that are older, and for things that have a high relevance in the sitemap.

    If you're interested, you should also try installing one of the "SEO optimizer" plugins for WordPress. I did that recently, and didn't have a noticable increase in traffic, but it seemed like a good idea anyway. That said, I don't monitor traffic that closely...

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  2. Are you using the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress at all? For me it works wonders, have not had any spam comments in months.

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  3. @Steve You are probably right about the difference being caused by the sitemap plugin. When I wrote the sitemap plugin for LifeType I didn't fill out the relevance value.

    @Thomas I am using the Akismet plugin. It works great.

    ReplyDelete

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