I have some blogs that almost act as forums. They have 1000s of comments. I think ultimately, that is the goal of having a blog, to build a community. WordPress + good writing = community participation = traffic. However, there is one issue with
having an active community. That is, sometime people get out of control. Therefore the question is how do you moderate your comments on your WordPress blog that is ideal for SEO and your blog in general.
Some people are so thrilled to get comments they will accept almost anything that comes along. I do not . I moderate comments based on writing quality not opinions, unless they are really just negativity. I believe in comment Karma. I also drop comments based on spam of course. Spam can take many forms including writing that is so low quality it does not add value to the reader. I do not care if the extra buzz would help me in the search engines, I do not like drive by commentors who use chat style writing.
Tools to use for comment moderation
- After the Deadline – this is not something that most people think of when they think of comment moderation, but I do. After the Deadline is a Firefox add-on or WordPress plugin that helps fix grammar and style and spelling mistakes. If you have heated debated people often ignore these things and it will leave your blog looking trashy. I do not think search engines like it either. Therefore, I highly recommend using the tool After the Deadline.
- Having a comment policy page – I know you do not want to pass important juice to policy pages, but I have comment policy, contact privacy policy pages etc all over my blogs and I also use my real names on all of them. The more open you are and straight forward, I think the more trust worth your site is.Do not worry about PR as much as being open with people. I tell people in my comment policy pages, here are the rules.
- Comment checker – I check questionable commentators against project honey pot’s IP inspector. You can of course use some plugins that will ban users with questionable IPs, however, I do not do this as it gives false positives. For example, I share an IP address from my Internet provider in Poland where I love and I have a bad IP. I consider myself a Spam fighter, however, someone in my neighborhood is spending out e-mails. Here is the comment IP checker I use to help moderate them with. If the comment is well written and note a one liner I approve it even if it’s IP is questionable.
My one question to you use how do you go about moderating your comments?
When to approve a comment
How do you know if you should approve a comment for your WordPress blog? Many people I know approve every comment on their blog. They approve comments, even it is a online.
I recommend you approve comments that only add to user experience and have some value. Drive by bloggers with useless comments should be deleted. Do you like coming to a blog with a lot of useless comments taking up pages and pages of space and your time? I do not so do not promote this on your blog even if you are happy to get even one comment.
Blog comments I do not approve
Further, I rather try to have some standards and determine if they are reasonable in terms of spelling grammar and ideas. Sometimes I am more liberal with my approval process.
However blog comments that are misspelled or in chat style I don’t approve. Often, I do not approve ping back as this makes things look cluttered and the idea of ping back even confuse me.
I do not approve comments with links in them unless they are very important relevant links, more often than not people are just simply promoting her own blog.
Even though WordPress has done away with no follow on the comments, I do not like links in my comments as it messes up my blog and take away SEO focus.
Disprove of comments that open the door to being hacked
From time to time I have some comments that might look up but there is something funny about them. I choose not to approve them. Although I do not have proof, I think somehow hackers start to gain access to your blog via first getting approved in the comment section, then latter coming back.
I look at the country of origin for these comments to determine if I should approve them. For example, I have a Ukrainian language site and when some guy from Vietnam leaves a comment (I ask myself what are the chances of some Vietnamese guys is interesting in Ukrainian grammar) and then I start to see strange activity, I immediately hit the spam button on the comment approval area.
Real names in comments
Further, I look at the user name in the comment section. If people use their real name then they are less likely to be spam. I am more likely to approve a real name then some fictitious name. This is because this is less spammy.
Matt Cutts from Google also has this policy, that you should try to use your real name when leaving a comment. This will significantly cut down on the amount of spam you get because the Internet when it’s anonymous, often comments get out of control.
What you should do is, you should approve comments that are user friendly. That is comments that will help the users experience and genuinely add something to your blog. Comments just to have more comments in my opinion may seem good but it doesn’t add anything to the experience.
Encourage comments
One last note do not be too paranoid about comment approval. The point of a blog is to start a conversation, web 2.0 and all. Many people say very good things in short comments. And of course always try to reply to start the dialogue. Your blog almost should act as a forum, with user generated content.
Encourage comments, but disprove comments from drive by commentators with little value.
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