Wednesday, August 25, 2010

TIP: Moderate comments on your blog.

If you decide as a business to create and maintain a blog it is a good idea to enable comment moderation. That is you review and accept comments rather than automatically accept comments.

The majority of comments I receive are thinly disguised attempts at marketing. The concern I have is some of the sites attempting to market themselves may be malicious sites. Rather than potentially expose my readers to malicious sites, I review each comment.

For example today I received the following comment.

Earning money online never been this easy and transparent. You would find great tips on how to make that dream amount every month. So go ahead and click here for more details and open floodgates to your online income. All the best

If this was an email it would have been considered spam. But as a comment on a blog, it is up to the owner of the blog to make sure this type of material does not see the light of day.

Just to show how many blogs have been seeded with this comment I decided to perform a check on a phrase in the comment to give me an indication of how many blogs have this comment. I selected the words "more details and open floodgates to your online income." and performed a search on the phrase.

The results were:
Google: 339,000
Bing: 570,000

As you can see this is just one example of a single blog comment. I receive quite a few of these type of comments and I'm sure others do as well. With over half a million blogs seeded with this one comment, it is easy to imagine there are billions of comments that have been added to blogs which have no direct relationship to the content of the blog.

A very common ploy marketers use is to compliment a blog and say they'll let others know. We all like a comment so it is easy to be tricked. If you then check out the link to the person writing the comment you'll see it is trying to promote a site or a business. These people aren't interested in your site. Their only interest is to find sites which will help promote them. If a comment doesn't specifically relate to content in your site, chances are it is marketing.

If you own a blog, or thinking of setting one up, I highly recommend you moderate comments and look after the interests of your readers.

Kelvin Eldridge

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