Moderate Your Comments!

Any blog that's been up for a while, allows comments, and has at least a reasonable amount of online visibility will eventually run into the problem of unwanted comments being posted by complete strangers. These commenters are usually out to accomplish one thing: get a link back to their own blog or website and siphon away some of your visitors. They're often running automated scripts or software that allow them to post comments on a vast scale, leaving their spammy messages and links throughout the blogosphere, and annoying bloggers and their readers by introducing a jarring and unpleasant distraction to their blog enjoyment.

It used to be that leaving comments with a link back to your own site would help your search engine rankings, since they counted each comment as a new backlink and therefore a virtual "vote" in favor of that site's importance. But since this led to a deluge of blog spam, Google and other search engines have cracked down by adding a "no follow" tag to blog comment links, which prevents them from being tracked by the search engine crawlers and therefore negates the search optimization angle for blog comment spammers.

But they're still out there, looking for the free traffic that thousands of comment links can bring them. How do you catch them before they stink up your comments sections with the spammy ravings? Turn on your comment moderation feature! Any decent blog software should offer this option. In Blogger, for example, you can find it in the Comments section of the Settings tab on your blog dashboard. Switch it on and all potential comments will be routed to your email for you to review and approve or disapprove before being posted on your blog. This will help ensure that every comment added to your blog posts is a wanted comment, and not some weirdo spammer trying to sell your readers cheap Viagra or fraudulent stock tips or a second mortgage or larger genitalia. Do your readers need these things? In general, probably not.

Key terms: comments, moderation, spam, scripts, software, backlinks, search optimization, moderater, moderateing