Moderating blog comments counts
Moderating comments* left on your blog is just another time-consuming task, right?
It one sense yes it is – if you get a lot of spam it can be very tedious to check comments regularly, and moderating does take time that you may want to spend doing income-producing tasks.
However, there are a number of benefits to moderating your comments rather than just accepting any your spam filter allows through. I was just reminded of this after reading a post on a high traffic blog and seeing an obvious spam comment in amongst a number of real comments – along with no replies to the commenters, the spam just made her look lazy and disinterested.
So my quick list of reasons to moderate blog comments is:
- it gives you the opportunity to immediately reply to genuine comments and build your community
- you look interested in the blog and its readers
- you protect your readers from potentially dangerous links (most spam comments are about getting more links to dubious sites)
- you will sometimes find fantastic comments accidentally treated as spam by filters
- you can maintain the brand and tone of your comments. For example, you can keep people from using vulgar or hateful language, stop people attacking each other and accept only realistic and appropriate negative comments. You may reject comments completely or edit specific comments to suit if they contain a worthwhile message
Moderating comments is an easy task that you can do at the end of the working day or when you need a mental break, or you could outsource it to save time (but be sure to review yourself to answer comments).
Do you moderate comments or just let them go live?
* Moderating comments simply means looking at each comment and deciding if will go live on your site, or not. There is usually a comments section in your administration area where it is easy to view pending comments and deal with them as you wish.
Yep, great advise – you want to do a ‘Google’ on your readers and enhance their experience on your site not make it a pain.
Thanks for leaving a comment Michelle. You’re right – making things unpleasant for readers is not likely to bring them back to your blog. I have read a number of blog posts where the conversation between commenters is at leads as interesting and/or informative as the original post itself, so keeping spam and nonsense out of your comments will enhance the experience of people reading through a list of comments.
Anyone can appropriately reword comments, you must be creative and even more creative. YOu can make the comments more suited to your style and needs when moderating them.
Thanks for leaving a comment, warez. it’s true you can reword people’s comments as part of aprpoving them, making them more relevant or more suited to your objectives, but I personally don’t like that. I prefer to have genuine comments in my blog that add to the conversation and maybe give readers (including me) a new idea or inspiration. People don’t have to agree with me to get their comment approved as long as it is a genuine comment and respectful of other people’s opinions.
This is an excellent final result about blog comments, and the details you go into are great. I’ll be sure to moderate comments form now on, too!
Thanks Tamika. I’m sure your blog readers will appreciate your efforts in moderating psots – spam comments waste everyone’s time and I think it is friendly to reply to genuine comments 🙂
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Guest post is one of the best way to increase traffic.I agree with you participating in the blog commenting builds quality back links.Good points
Thanks for your comment, Julian.