Top Tips for Automated Comments

Since the Google Farmer update and the renewed focus on website content, we are finding more WP site owners are installing CommentPiG on their blogs.  (As discussed in a previous post, a blog with comments does not have one of the obvious footprints of an autoblog or ‘content farm’).

As a result, I find I’m getting more questions about CommentPiG these days.  Ultimately what people are asking is this:

How Do You Get the Best Results from CommentPiG?

You want comments fast, you want a good supply of them, you want this done automatically. BUT you also want the comments to be as on-topic and life-like as possible.

Based on a recent blog where I installed CommentPiG, and Gary’s thoughts on the matter, I thought I’d share some tips to help if you are using or plan to use CommentPiG.  They’ve worked for me.

Steer The PiG

To run CommentPiG in fully automated mode, delivering the best possible comments automatically, you need to set it off on the right track (and then the PiG gets passive, honestly):

1. Make sure your tags are spot on.  By default CommentPiG searches for suitable comments based on the tags in the posts.  On topic tags = on topic comments.  (We use TagPiG on all our WP sites, including this one).  You can ask CommentPiG to reference other targets e.g. post title or another custom field of your choice but the same rule applies – make sure they are on topic!
2. Under the ‘Filters’ section of the plugin, tick the ‘Keyword in Comment’ box.  This means the keyword (taken from the tags or post title etc.) will feature in the comment to be posted, helping relevancy



3. Set CommentPiG to reference tags only with two or more words – you can do this under ‘General Settings’.  S0, on a post about trout fishing tagged with ‘trout fishing’ and ‘fishing’ it would get comments about the tag ‘trout fishing’ (on target) but ignore the tag ‘fishing’ (too broad)

Personally, this delivers results I am happy with but different niches or topics can get different results.  If you really want to hone CommentPiG’s perfomance on a particular blog, you can employ this fourth tactic:

4. Take the time to switch each comment source on individually to test the quality and relevance of the comments.

Different sources can deliver better or worse results depending on the niche of the site. By testing them, you will get an idea of which sources to enable and which to disable for your niche.

You can speed up this process by hitting the ‘Post Comment Now’ link after each source has been turned on, so you can see immediate results.  This button can be found under ‘Status’ on the top right of the CommentPiG settings page.

So, this up front work can take a wee bit of time (maybe an hour to test the sources?) but then you can leave CommentPiG to run automatically in confidence.

Holding CommentPiG’s Hand*

*Trotter?

If you have a website which needs special attention, or you feel you need to be especially fussy about the comments posted to your blog, you could consider running CommentPiG in semi-automated mode.

You can use our four free comment scrapers (available in the members’ area) to pre-scrape comments and drop them in an Excel file. You can then manually edit them in the file and upload them to CommentPiG as a local database.

You can set CommentPiG to draw comments from this database, meaning you guarantee you are happy with each and every comment because you’ve had some input before publication.

This takes more time than the fully automated mode but is obviously a hugely faster and more scalable means to get comments than waiting for real visitors to comment.

Get More from BlogPiG

So, I hope this helps you get the best performance out of CommentPiG.  I’ll post this content to the knowledge base too for future reference.

I’d be interested to hear if you think we should change the default settings of CommentPiG to those I’ve outlined here.

Got any more helpful tips you’d care to share about using this product?

You can find out more about CommentPiG here.

Happy blogging,

Fiona

Tags: topic tags, topic comments, Farmer update, WP site owners, comment plugin, free comment scrapers