Moderating Blog Comments – How Strict Should You Be?
Aren’t you happy that your blog is receiving comments regularly?
To be really honest, when you start to receive comments on your blog, it is just a temporary benefit where how your blog looks like after this is going to depend on how you moderate all the incoming comments.
I am saying this because once you approved those comments; they are going to appear not only to yourself, but also your readers and probably advertisers. From there, your comments do affect how your readers and advertisers see in you.
The problem with lenient moderation
When you don’t care about the quality in your comments, you are basically letting all the low quality comments on your blog.
I’m not talking about those comments from spammers because that can be handled by Akismet or any other anti-spam plugins out there.
What I am talking here are comments from other bloggers who are just there to leave a “Thank you” or comment on your blog without reading the content. If I happen to be a new reader for your blog and having read all those low quality comments, I will give myself a second thought whether I should interact in your blog or I should just drop a “Thank you” and leave them.
Why you should moderate strictly
The main problem of moderating blog comments in a very strict manner is you might not get as many comments as you could probably have. For instance, instead of 10 comments, you might just get 3 or 4 comments.
If you have a doubt whether you should go for quality or quantity, I think you and I know that SEO today is all about quality and that should do the same for blog comments.
If you don’t moderate your comments strictly, you will only end up with lots of low quality comments on your site which eventually devalued your site. I personally would not want to comment on those sites seriously because I know the moderator basically don’t care and he/she should not care even if I wrote a valuable comment.
Tips for new blog
If you just started a new blog, it could be tough for you to get comments. For the first few 5 or 10 comments, you might want to allow certain “Thank you” comment to encourage them to start engaging but once you had them on board, try to get them or new commentators to do something more valuable.
Another tip here is, don’t threat negative comments as low quality comments. You should find a way to battle with those negative comments and not avoiding them.
About the Author:
Alan Tay is blogger who runs Blogging Fever, a blog that features about blogging tips such as writing tips, blog commenting, and some basic SEO. Apart from that, he also send weekly newsletter on common blogging mistake.
Image courtesy of: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Share this article
Category: Others
About the Author (Author Profile)
Kori is the editor and owner of Netchunks, a premier blog about Webmaster and Blogging Tips. She intends to make the web a friendlier place by sharing info and articles which will help other webmasters and bloggers to become successful online.Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Twitter: joeb3219
says:
My take on the whole thing is simple – I let my Akismet filter grab the chunks of spam comments that are left by bots (which is now about 1,000 a day). I then have a plugin called Conditional Captcha go ahead and commentators who left a comment marked as spam a captcha. If it fails, it gets deleted. If not, then the comment is sent to me for moderation.
I have my blog set up to allow all comments from people with a previously accepted comment. Nothing bad gets through, and everyone wins.
Joe Boyle recently posted..The Best Launch Since the Curiosity Rover
Twitter: Blogging_Fever
says:
Sounds like a good comment moderation plan there. I have not use any Captcha simply because I myself don’t like to comment on blogs with Captcha. But it should work for blogs like yours that receive 1k a day. But if it is bots, I think the G.A.S.P should do the thing, shouldn’t it?
Alan Tay recently posted..How to submit your blog to web directory after Post-Penguin
Twitter: joeb3219
says:
I think you slightly misunderstood. I don’t like capthcas either. That’s why I don’t show legit commentators them – only those who are marked as spam get shown one. If the comment gets by Akismet without being flagged, then no captcha is displayed – it just goes right to me for moderation
Joe Boyle recently posted..What Your Sidebar Actually Needs
Twitter: webmaisterpro
says:
I personally don’t moderate comments, if I don’t like it I don’t accept it. I know that many people moderate comments and in one particular case, I saw my comment completely different after this moment, I never visited this blog again.
Twitter: Blogging_Fever
says:
I understand your feeling because the moderator completely amend your comments.
I don’t do that unless it is a grammatical error or some typo error. I will let the comments through even if it is negative.
Alan Tay recently posted..How to choose a niche that never runs out of writing idea
Negative comments can be a plus. Sometimes your subscribers will step up to your defense.
That makes for a longer comment discussion, and looks great for new traffic!
Alex recently posted..Four Fresh Spinach Recipes
Twitter: Blogging_Fever
says:
Yeps and in fact I like negative comment in the way that I can further improve my blog and get more writing ideas for my next blog post. Unless it is flaming or comment in a insulting way, then it will be a healthy environment for discussion.
Alan Tay recently posted..CommentLuv Premium Review
Twitter: creately
says:
Good comment moderation is always good in the long term. However it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify spam comments. For example some people just copy and paste the comments above them ( or slightly modifies them ) which can easily slip past if you’re getting quite a few comments.
Nishadha recently posted..WBS Template
Twitter: Blogging_Fever
says:
Yeps Nishadha. So, as long as the comment give value, it should be okay to let them slip through I personally think. As for those short and meaningless comment, just thrash them without any second thought
Alan Tay recently posted..Four Misconception on the purpose of blog commenting
Twitter: techtalkafrica
says:
You are so right Nishadha, I think if you have a blog that’s still new or not yet started getting lots of traffic, it may make sense to be more lenient but once it gets to a point where it has started getting huge traffic, it’s time to become stricter
Hi Alan,
These days, you will find a lot of spam made by people employed to do lots of blog comments per day. The problem with their comments is that they lack quality and are obviously copy-pasted from a universal comment they do with all their blog-commenting, evidently showing you that they have not even read the post itself as the comment has nothing to do with the topic of the post. At times if you look at their IP addresses during moderation, you’ll notice that despite the different names, emails, and URL they promote, the comments are just coming from one IP address. This is why most of the time, the best course of action for handling comments would be strict moderation.
Felicia recently posted..Win a share of $1 Million in the Autumn Million on Party Poker!
I think if you want to maintain the quality of your blog, strict moderation is necessary. While moderating the comments, mainly look for grammatical and sentence errors. Also, we need to check if the comment is related to the blog or is a spam comment. Strictly moderating your comments will let your readers know how seriously you take your blog and your blog reputation will also increase.
Hi.I wanted to drop you a quick note to express my thanks. I’ve been following your blog for a month or So and have picked up a ton of good information as well as enjoyed the way you’ve structured your site. Thanks for sharing information regarding blogs.
Thanks for this nice share.I really found your post very helpful.Please keep sharing such nice post.
Twitter: webmaisterpro
says:
I am against comment moderation, but with this high level of comment spam, I see good reason why this is done by many bloggers.