Sometimes I wonder who is my audience? I mean I write my blog posts, and get my traffic, and some comments. But everybody knows that the comments are a very small percentage of the actual amount of readers. I looked at my Google analytics results from all of the visitors on mastersofseo ever, and they averaged 1M and 41 S on my blog. Now that’s not very good but it’s not awful either. A minute and 40 seconds is a long time to look at one page. And also each visit averages 1.72 pages per visit. Then I totaled up my amount of visitors and using that information I used an online calculator and figured out what percentage of my visitors commented. It was pretty depressing number, only 6.521739130434782% or rounding up 7% of my visitors comment.

So I started thinking about that, 7%, that’s not very much, what do the other 93% do? I mean if they’re looking around for almost two minutes, is that just reading time? You must also remember this includes all of my traffic. So lots of 0 seconds visits from search engines and social media sites, so the actual amount of readers time will be much higher. So after realizing a very tiny percentage of my readers commented, I was curious about who commented. After analyzing my comments, I realized, a very large percentage of my commentators are by other bloggers in this same niche. Just take a look at my top commentators, they’re almost all sites about SEO, Social Media, Blogging Tips, or Making Money Online. And this has always been that way for my site. The commentators have always been related bloggers. And I started thinking, is this the same on other blogs? Every site I look at it’s the same thing. Bloggers from the same niche commenting on each other. And after hearing about John Chow’s study on why bloggers comment, and seeing an overwhelming percentage of them comment for the purpose of getting traffic back to their site, I’m becoming skeptical. So I checked another site in the same niche. Almost every other blogging tips or MMO site I visited, the top commentators are all bloggers from the same niche. Now not only is it the same niche, but as I looked I realized, it’s the same people as well. There are about 50 MMO or HTB bloggers, who comment on each other’s site.

Too many people have read the Blog Commenting Blueprint and are taking advantage of it. But commenting is starting to lose it’s innocence as a result. All of these bloggers are subscribed to each others sites, and the top commentators on each other’s sites. So if a majority of commentators are commenting for their own selfish purposes, I wonder how many legit commentators there are? I’m considering removing all comment plugins, because if people are visiting my site and commenting only for the purpose of trying to help out their own site, what purpose am I serving? I always get excited when I have a comment without a url attached, because that means they weren’t doing it for their own benefit, but rather were doing it to actually comment their opinion. Now I’m almost happy only 7% of my readers are commenting, because that means only 7% of my readers are potentially trying to take advantage of the situation. 93% are just reading, and learning. I hope that as time goes on, either that 7% will continue to go down, or the 93% will start to comment, but their blogs will be completely unrelated, or they won’t even have blogs at all. I wonder if they removed the url box for comments, would that completely remove all greed from the commenting situation. Now take what you want from this rant, I’m just saying what I think for once, without buttering it up. I know I said not to rant, but I’ve never done it before, and I’m curious to see the reaction.