The comment section of our blogs isn’t just a place to accept remarks and statements from our readers; it is also one special part of our website that is useful to our internal SEO strategies. That’s why some bloggers who are overly concerned of their SEO treat their commenting section as if it is the most important part of their site: they check it daily, delete unnecessary comments, omit spams, and reply to each comments that interest them. But that is not always the case. While some take care of their comments seriously, others just leave their comment section free and “unmoderated”, regardless if spammers and Web urchins will invade their blogs.
It is all up to you as a blog owner whether you want to moderate your comment section or not. Of course, moderation means responsibility and the latter means being carefree. With moderation comes responsibility, the blogging cliché reminds, for it means daily checking of comments, deciding whether to delete one comment or not to or whether it’s a spam or not, and categorizing which comments are important to read to what are not. Also, if your blog is rather popular and manages to receive loads of comments in a day, skipping a day without moderation means extra work for the next day. Comment moderation is an arduous task, and if you are a serious blogger, taking this task for granted is a no-no.
Choosing to moderate Comments
If you want to be more carefree and stress free, you can always choose not to moderate your comments. Why not? It’s your choice and it is your right. But it only works for those who only blogs for fun and not for those who use their blog for business, especially those who are into Search Engine Optimization.
If you are an SEO-concerned blogger, leaving your comment section free to all commenters and Web lurkers practically exempts you from laborious and grueling moderation duty, but it logically opens your site to future problems. Spams are the ruffians of the Web, and having them on your blog may send out a very negative impression to your readers. With this, you may lose potential customers, because they might think that these “spammy links” are affiliated to you and your business. There are also readers and customers that are just simply annoyed with spams because they block the important comments on the thread. But the worst thing is when you lose potential link building partners, which is the key to expanding networks on the Web, empowering SEO and get future loyal customers just because of skipping moderation, by taking your comment section for granted.
This article is written by Warner Carter. He enjoys writing about SEO, Marketing, and Website Development.
Thanks for article! Definitely a bummer when people wreck the conversation for everyone else and when people just don’t care about their blogs.
SEO is getting to be a tough business, but so worth it when you do it right. Contributing to blog posts, and making sure what you are doing is on the right track. I avoid blogs that have spammed out comments, because I don’t want my product associated with all that.
This is very much tough to get seo ..Man !! skiing about this.. hope one day i can have some seo knowledge.. thanks for this wonderful post.
Hi,
Nice tips and I do agree that moderating comment is very important. Moreover I am using DoFollow for my comment section and there are so many spammers commenting over there. Sharing Commentluv is quite a difficult task with all of these spammers targeting your blog. Any Suggestions??
Yes Prakash, that is one of the most common issues faced by bloggers. I would recommend you to use anti-spam plugins other than Akismet in your case.
You can try this :
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/growmap-anti-spambot-plugin/
Great post there.
That's an addition for my knowledge.
You really explain how SEO affects the costumers.
I believe the key to blog commenting is to talk with sense. Don't just write a gibberish comment. Start a conversation or a critical review. Not only are you able to leave a link, you'll also gather some fans. 🙂
Good points. I work with SEO to (in Norway) and we can't leave our comment section open. We get all kinds of spam and unrelated comments.
someone said fewer people comment because more people just like and tweet instead. I think that can depend on the blog. People comment a lot here at Hellboundbloggers.
DoFollow plus top commenter prize, what else does one need?
Completely agree with your points. One must moderate their website and should try doing new things.
It takes one second for a reader to distinguish between legitimate and spam comments.
genuine blog commenting that adds value can do a lot to build traffic to any blog
I believe that the comment section is where your readers can get involve with your post. And I think that the moderation should be limited to spammy comments like "Great post",I" love this post", etc. But negative feedback should not be deleted instead answer them, clarify things that seems vague for your readers. Be open to your audience's point of view.
But sometimes "Great post" might also be a legit comment. How could one distinguish?
The comment section of our blogs isn’t just a place to accept remarks and statements from our readers; it is also one special part of our website that is useful to our internal SEO strategies.
@Alan Google does depreciate the value of links based on where they are coming from and what type of links they are, even to the point of completely ignoring the link.
I guess Google does.
But, that doesn't seem to be enough does it?
Otherwise I wouldn't be getting spammy comments on every blog I set up.
There are also all these link blaster tools you can buy for not very much and hundreds of people on fiverr that offer 30,000 links for $5 etc.
As an experiment, I set up an ELGG domain (a favorite of many automated tools) at around the start of 2011 and did nothing in terms of SEO etc …( I do require e-mail confirmation to filter out the really weak attempts)… it is still one on my busiest sites
Entities on site
Sites: 1
Users: 4441
Blog posts: 39170
Messages: 1084
Pure spam collector. No purpose, no promotion, no SEO etc. just pure organic spam / spambots
There are so many spammy comments nowadays, and you can pay for thousands of backlinks to be automatically posted for next to nothing. As an SEO strategy, backlinks – CURRENTLY – work and whilst Google et-al continue to grant site authority on backlinks, this situation is just going to get worse. But at some point it must end, the search engines need to de-prioritise backlink, or it will destroy a really useful part of the internet, surely?
Thank you to all the commentors. I think bloggers need to remember blogs are social strive to create a conversation. All the best blogs have this going on.
i agree with you comments should be moderated and should be fair not for leaving a link only as comments are mostly open for genuine conversation and information…..and i find your tips and information you shared very useful thanks for sharing…..
thats great. I too always moderate each and every comment. i also see the commenters link first and check their website then approve or dissapprove.
Hi Warner,
I agree that we should really moderate comments to our blogs. Even in my personal, non-profit blog, I still prefer to moderate comments because spam comments are really ugly, nonsense, and out of topic most of the time.
nice tips i ll follow these tips & thanks for sharing it's very useful part for seo !
I think comments section is really imp for getting a nice reputation among bloggers..Regular check on comments is needed regularly
I agreed…. If visitors see spam comments, they may think that you're not responsible blogger and don't care what your visitors thinks and what they want to share with you.