Blog Comments : When it is Useful and Harmful? .

Benefits of Blog comments:

So, first understand why it is important for any blogger to get comments and how it’s going to help in SEO and branding

SEO Benefits:

Google indexes comments on any page and recently they have made their bots smart enough to index Fb comments if you have implemented. A useful comment on your post helps in increasing the keyword variation, and it makes your blog more reachable for long tail Keywords.

Example: if I write about SEO guide and some commentator comments with more useful information’s like LSI, Social media promotion, Google authorship which is modern day SEO technique, this add more useful information to my post and also helps in ranking for long tail keywords like “modern SEO +Social media promotion” and so on.

Trust & Popularity:

Social media share count helps in showing new visitor that readers trust this blog, and that’s why people share its content. Though the real popularity and Ego boost comes only when you are getting meaningful comments.

It usually takes 2-3 hours to come up with a well-researched post and to get a one line comment is more like hey I just acknowledged you, whereas meaningful blog comments will help in better engagement and bring conversation and discussion to your blog  post.

Disadvantages of accepting Blog comments:

Let me clear out that I don’t mean you should not accept comments, but you should be strict about your comment policy. Let me help you out here with my views and later on you can add your opinion on the same.

Increases Spam:

Many webmasters buy blog commenting services to add comments on their blog. There is no second thought, adding blog comments on the different domain will help your blog in the long run and we have already seen how it helped me to get PR 3. So there is no doubt, commenting helps you to pass link-juice.

Now, when you accept comments like “Nice post” “Wow an awesome guide” “I landed on this blog for searching for “%Post title%” and I really liked it and I’m going to subscribe to your blog right away”, it doesn’t add value to your post and also your outbound link cycle will be disrupted. I have noticed it late but if you know of “Related Google operator”, you will realize what I meant. Here the is related report for ShoutMeLoud and most of the related links which Google has determined here comes using Blog commenting.

Google related operator

This is one of my biggest mistakes to accept all the comments in the past, which doesn’t add any value. I’m not saying they were spam, but they didn’t add any value to the post. My suggestion: If you are accepting such comments which doesn’t add any value, simply reject them. Also, have a policy to accept comments only with the real name and now like “SEO Brisbane” “SEO India” and so on. A genuine commentator knows the importance of using a name or brand name for the personal touch. Is, isn’t it?

You lose genuine commentator:

When I see a great post, and I think of adding comment there, I see 10-20 comments like “Great post” “Useful posts” and so on and I don’t find worth wasting my 5-10 minutes of time to add a kickass comment. I would rather jump to some other blog where real commentators are participating and engaging. What about you? Do you comment on such blogs?

Database Size:

How many of you complaints about increasing database size and site going down without much traffic. Believe it, it mostly happens due to enormously huge database size and keeping such useless blog comments away from your blog, you helping your blog. Though, just in case if you are not aware you need to keep cleaning your wp_comments table to remove all spam comments cached by Akismet.

Solution to such bogus comments:

One easy and quick solution is to implement 3rd party services like Facebook commenting system which requires user to comment using their Facebook comments and no one would like to spoil their social media presence and also you will get rid of those comments which come from Blog commenting services and software’s like Scrapebox.

Another solution is to implement comment by registration only, and this will help you to get genuine readers register your site and add value. You may offer various registration options like Facebook, Twitter and so on. Most of the popular sites, which get lots of comment are using the same method. This not only helps in eradicating spam comments but also your outbound link will be controlled.

Here are few things which I look before accepting comments:

• Name and link (Spam or real)
• Is the Comment meaningful?
• Is the link in comment adding value or not?

None the less, at times I also check spam comment tab to recover all those genuine comments which have been marked by Akismet as spam. Believe it, years back I used to love the fact that I’m getting 50+ comments on all blog post, but I realize it was not as good as I thought. Infect, it not only devalue my outbound links but also uselessly increasing my page load time. Many bloggers suggest disabling comments on old blog posts, but I would not advocate that in ever case, as Blogging is all about one to many interactions where readers also share their opinion and reaction via comments.