comments on blogs

[wesley]

Is there any good reason from a marketing standpoint to let people leave comments on your blogs?

I have a blog that I left the comments turned off but I see that within a short time of launching the blog, out of 36 comments, only 3 were useable and relevant to my readers. The rest were spam or vulgarity aka garbage.

Should I just delete all comments or does anyone know of a valid purpose for that info?

thx for the help ~

[1mak]

hmmm,
i think comments are good for the interactivity of a webpage. people like it to be able to leave their thoughts and you will have more (coming back) visitors

[ramfir]

Are you using wordpress? If you are, I suggest you install askimet plugin. It helps filter unwanted/spam comments. It has help me a lot.

[sudarshannus]

Also please allow users to login for comments,this will reduce the most no of spams

[wesley]

Thx for the suggestions guys. No I do not have the plugin installed ramfir but will get it and do that.

Good idea to force sign ups sudar.

Bit by bit I am making my WP blog better by all the suggestions I am getting here on this forum

[yogesh]

Comments are important in a blog and I wouldn’t recommend turning them off. However if you are using the blog in conjunction with a forum, then it might be sensible to let people comment in your forum rather than the blog.

[alpha]

I have made it a habit to comment on forums and blogs. especially the ones which are dofollow.

[kingjacob]

Unless your blog is just MFA, than comments are an absolute necessity as they allow interactivity and make people more likely to come back and maybe even subscribe to your feed. Also peoples comments are invaluable in creating a good blog.

[RovingCalypso]

You can easily take care of spam if you use a good spam filter.

I take it you are using wordpress. It comes with Akismet which is a great tool. Since my activation, i haven't had problem with spam.

[wesley]

I guess you have given me some insight into a blog and its working. It never dawned on me that letting people make comments actually builds a community and keeps people coming back.

Do you guys allow the people who leave a comment to include a link to their website if it is relevant and of benefit to your readers?

[sudarshannus]

Originally Posted by wesley

I guess you have given me some insight into a blog and its working. It never dawned on me that letting people make comments actually builds a community and keeps people coming back.

Do you guys allow the people who leave a comment to include a link to their website if it is relevant and of benefit to your readers?

Yes,absolutely,you are bound to do that,since people will only come back to your blog,if you give them some freedom and add their website to your blog

[joshua]

Yes I ahve no problem for people to leave their website links on my blog as it is a nofollow tag meaning that I do not risk to be penalised for outbound links.

[ryno33]

I love when I get comments on my blog. It tells me a lot. Shows that people are reading my stuff and whether or not they like it. I don't see any downside really, but everyone has a different opinion.

[AffiliateSeeking]

Originally Posted by ryno33

I love when I get comments on my blog. It tells me a lot. Shows that people are reading my stuff and whether or not they like it. I don't see any downside really, but everyone has a different opinion.

The downside of having blog comments is that you can also get alot of spam mixed in with the good ones.

If you know some programming though, you can prevent most, if not all spam. There is probably also some mods that can be used for some blog scripts.

[ryno33]

I see. That hasn't happened to me yet, but I will keep that in mind.