Last week I reviewed a popular WordPress plugin called the ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior‘. The response was really fun to see – people love to hear honest opinions about WordPress plugins. I have decided to make my plugin reviews a weekly tradition. This week’s addition is the ‘Show Top Commentators‘ plugin.

Short Version Of The Review:

The show top commentators plugin really gets people talking on your site. If you are in need of sparking up some conversation this is where you should start. The installation is fairly simple and consists of downloading the plugin, extracting it, uploading it to your site, and installing a piece of PHP code where you want it to show up.

Long Version Of The Review

Here’s the breakdown of what I’ll cover in the review:

• What The Plugin Does
• SEO Benefits
• SEO Negatives
• Knowledge Required To Install The Plugin
• Installing The Plugin
• My Overall Thoughts On The Plugin

What The Plugin Does

The ‘Show Top Commentators’ plugin for WordPress is a great way to reward your readers for participating in the discussion on your site. The plugin adds a small section to your site that shows your readers that have left the most comments. On my site it looks like this:

As you can see, each of the top commentators are displayed according to how many comments they have left. Each of them receives a link back to their site in exchange for their participation. Since I installed the plugin in my sidebar, the ‘Comment Champs’ of this site appear on every page of the site.

SEO Benefits

I can see one really big benefit to installing the plugin. From a search engine’s point of view, when people leave comments they are adding content to your pages. This proves to search engines that your site is a living, breathing organism that is being constantly updated.

One problem that I had when I was creating static sites is that my pages would start dropping in Google until I updated them. I would have to go through each page and add content or they would continually drop in Google’s rankings. Adding fresh content to the pages reversed the drop. When people leave comments on your pages this addition of fresh content is being done for you.

Since the addition of the ‘Show Top Commentators’ plugin to this site, my comments have easily tripled. I know that many users are just leaving comments so that they can appear on that list, but who cares? If their comments are worthless I just delete them. 99% of them add value to the site.

SEO Negatives

One SEO negative that I can see is that I am now giving away 10 additional links on each page of the site. I don’t really have a lot of control over who I’m linking to in my ‘Comment Champs’ section. Ideally I want my site to link only to good sites that are related to mine. Since I am now linking to several sites that aren’t 100% related to mine the use of the plugin has created a slight SEO negative for while creating an SEO positive for my readers.

In my opinion this small, SEO sacrifice for the reader will result in more discussion and will ultimately add value to any site.

Knowledge Required To Install The Plugin

• FTP / Uploading – Here’s a lesson on how to upload using FTP if you need it.
• How To Edit WordPress Template Files (I will show you how to do this but it will of course help if you already have done it.)

Installing The Plugin

Disclaimer: If you mess up installing a plugin you can really mess up your site! I wouldn’t go past this point if you don’t know how to manipulate HTML. Back everything up beforehand. Honestly, if you don’t back-up your theme’s files, you will wish you did. I obviously can’t take responsibility if you mess your site up and I provide this walk-through as-is and without warranty. I repeat: I will take no responsibility whatsoever if your site gets messed up! That said, this obviously worked for me.

• Download the plugin.
• Extract the plugin. Find the file on your computer and right click your mouse on it. Select ‘Extract All’ or ‘Extract Here’ or whatever version of extract it says. Extract the file.
• Upload the file (show_top_commentators.php) to your wp-content/plugins directory (folder) of your hosting account.
• Login to your WordPress admin and activate the plugin. Once you log in you will go to ‘Plugins’. You will then find the one called ‘Show Top Commentators’, clicking its ‘Activate’ link.
• Paste the following piece of PHP code in the place where you want your ‘Top Commentators’ to show up:

<?php if(function_exists(‘ns_show_top_commentators’)) { ?>

<li>

<h2>Top Commentators</h2>

<ul><?php ns_show_top_commentators(); ?></ul>

</li>

<?php } ?>

Since I wanted the ‘Top Commentators’ to appear in my sidebar, I had to paste the code into my sidebar. To do this, I had to go to my WordPress admin, click ‘Presentation’, and then click ‘Theme Editor’. I then found my sidebar file in the list of links on the right hand side of the screen. I clicked it which made it open up for editing. At this point I would recommend copying the entire code and pasting it into a notepad document. That way if you mess up you have the original file backed up.

Here is a screen-shot of where I pasted the code in:

As you can see, I pasted the code right before (above) <h2>Archives</h2><ul>, which will make it appear directly above my archives. I also changed ‘Top Commentators’ to ‘Comment Champs’ because I wanted it to say that instead.

• Save by clicking the ‘Update File’ button in the lower right corner of the screen. That’s it for the installation!
• Check to make sure it worked.

My Overall Thoughts On The Plugin

Since installing the plugin my comments have easily tripled, so it’s hard to not like it. My traffic has also increased because people know they can get some link love from me, and also because they get more interested in the discussion as they participate in it.

I also am well aware of the fact that using the plugin will make PageRank slightly harder to get. I don’t think it will have a huge impact, my educated guess tells me that it will affect the PageRank of my site by about 1/10th of a point. In other words I might get PageRank of 5.1 instead of 5.2 for the next update. It would show up as a 5 either way.

Since the negatives are minimal and the plugin helps my readers, it was an easy choice to stick with it. You will always see ‘Comment Champs’ on CourtneyTuttle.com, the plugin is here to stay.

*My sincere thanks to Taylor who recently added me to her Blogroll and to ZR5.net that reviewed my site yesterday.