I am going to keep this short and simple. Bloggers need commentors. It helps us better understand our readers. As far back as I can remember we have been fighting back spam. Over the years I changed up my personal guidelines.
First it was you needed an avatar. Then I decided just having a avatar wasn’t enough you needed to actually add value to the conversation. So for the longest time my guidelines for commenting on my blogs was:
- Have an Avatar
- Add value in your comment
As of the newest google update I have been getting bombarded with people requesting me to remove links from my blog. Keep in mind that these same people who are asking me to remove the links where the same people who wanted them here in the first place.
They hired people to leave comments on my blogs and over the years they got good at engaging my blog(s). I didn’t mind giving them link juice, even though I knew on some level it was probably hurting my own PR.
I have had link removal request as far back as 2 years ago. These same people who came to my blog to get back links are now asking me to remove their links because google doesn’t like it.
When I have free time I go remove the links but here is my warning to you….
First off never ever pay for someone to get you back links, you don’t know where they are coming from and google doesn’t like links that aren’t relevant to your niche. Google only likes backlinks that are in the same niche as yourself.Next, if your a blogger you have to look carefully at what links people are leaving. I use to not mind people putting up lead capture pages or even their businesses as back links. This has caused me a great inconvenience.
Just know you will get penalized if you are linking out to sites that aren’t in the same niche as your site.. It’s a lose/lose situation today. It hurts you and the person who is getting the link.
Of course there are still people out there selling commenting services and trying to get you the (blogger) to allow their comments.
I was trying to be a nice guy the result has been loosing pr, having people in some instances sending me threatening emails to remove their links. Save yourself the headache and follow these rules….
Commenting Rules You Should Adopt
- The person must have a gravatar or google plus account
- The person must add value to the blog post – (Great article I look forward to reading more isn’t acceptable)
- Only link to other bloggers, no lead capture pages, no business pages..
If you adopt these three rules you should have a higher quality comment and you more than likely won’t have to worry about someone sending you a email saying.
“Could you please remove the comment on X article”
It’s not my fault they did what they did. They came to my blog and freely left a comment. Now they want me to remove it because it doesn’t work for them anymore. The reason why it doesn’t work is because they weren’t being ethical from the very beginning.
They tried and buy credibility and authority rather than earn it.
I am a busy guy and time is money and I have thousands of comments across my blog network. I don’t have time to find that 1 comment I don’t have employee’s who do my work for me. I am not paying some overpriced advertising company to build my business.
I have been meaning to write about this for months, this morning though I got another email from someone asking me to remove yet another comment.
Has anyone else had any experiences with this? I know the new bloggers out there are eager to get comments, don’t be tempted by allowing lame crappy comments on your blog. Value your space online and realize that whatever you do it will have a long lasting impact.
I totally agree with what you wrote here, Larry. Keeping up you standards is HUGE for your online reputation. If bloggers or brands are just going to allow ANY comments on their posts (just to seems like they have followers), then what’s the whole point?!? I would rather have 2-3 poignant comments that leads to an intelligent discussion rather than 1,000 spammy or equally as lame remarks. Spot on, sir.
Thanks Jeremy, I think what some people don’t realize is the comment section is the most important section of a blog post.
It’s a priceless area and often times it is disrespected..
I didn’t have any experiences with this, but I still got a lot of spam and irrelevant comments (you know, like “great content” or comments with one or two sentences). In my first blog, I committed the mistakesof accepting many of those comments (Still, I had the policy that I will only accept comments from commentators with gravatars. I made few exceptions though. So, it wasn’t that bad).
I was stricter in my second blog (I suppose the main reason is because I decided to invest more time in blog commenting. So, I learned the comment policies of a lot of other blogs, and decided to modify mine accordingly).
You are right about the last point – we need to earn trust and credibility, not buy it (it never works that way!).
Anyways, thank you for the post, Larry!
Hey Jeevan, my monthly traffic and pagerank fluctuates often. Over the years I have been bombarded with all types of spam commentors..
I tried being nice and as a result google slapped the bejebus out of me…
You always leave awesome comments and provide value, thanks for commenting… 🙂
I’m totally against buying links, but as i know, many bloggers buy links. . .
Taking about comments, spammers are targeting commentluv enabled blogs with automated softwares to build backlinks. . .
Hey Adithya, ya lots of people buy links.. They did a lot of that last year and prior years. Now it’s coming back to bite them all in the ass…
I wish more blog owners were this strict with their comments.
I comment on a lot of blogs and have noticed a growing trend lately of some allowing utter rubbish to be posted.
It amazes me that people continue to ignore Googles advice on the matter.
Hi Mark, I agree it’s rude really. I mean how hard is it to actually read something and add something that is on topic?
It’s almost like they (spammers) don’t even understand that what they are commenting is utter garbage…
This is really very disgusting that people do comments and then ask you to remove them form the articles. I think what google did is best because it is really very irritating to remove the comments. Just to build backlinks people are doing these type of stuff.
Thanks for the sharing
I think this whole “you will get penalized if you are linking out to sites that aren’t in the same niche as your site” is just a myth and it’s overrated,
Myself and many other web design companies or other business that have a portfolio, they all have links coming from many different sites from their clients. all kinds of niches that have nothing to do with the main site niche/content and they do just great!
and unless your blog is already penalized or flagged by Google as a bad site, comments on your blog will be of no harm to any website, so asking for comment removal means nothing,
in fact if you have people asking for removing their comments you should be the one worried, not them, as you need to check your blog status with Google.
and PageRank have very very little to do with the SERP Rankings so if you’re not selling links depending on your PR, if you’re not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about!
Many thanks and Best wishes!
“Myself and many other web design companies or other business that have a portfolio, they all have links coming from many different sites from their clients. all kinds of niches that have nothing to do with the main site niche/content and they do just great!”
There is nothing wrong with links coming in, it’s the links that go out that are an issue.
that’s the point, in my portfolio, or any portfolio you are linking out to all your clients, many different sites that have nothing to do with your niche/content etc.. you are linking out to them from your portfolio!
think about it, if it was such of a big deal then no business website would make it in the search engine!
Many thanks, Best wishes!
As comment spamming does become more pressing, I agree that commments should be monitored but to say that someone simply complimenting your post isn’t acceptable, is outrageous
Hey James, those types of comments help nobody.. Not the blog owner, not the readers and certainly not the search engines…
They are empty comments with no real value…
HI Larry,
I agree with you what you mentioned. It becomes very difficult when you get 1000+ comments on your blog daily. People use tools for commenting and setting few advanced guidelines is a very good step to get rid of spammers.
Interesting article. Thanks for sharing! Do more elaborate CAPTCHA codes work well for anyone? We still seem to get some spam through our WordPress blog, but we’d like that number to decrease even more.
what are the benefits of commenting on blog posting? could you please elaborate this to me
Couldn’t agree more Larry. If people can’t be bothered to leave a thoughtful and relevant comment they don’t deserve a link.
If done strategically, blog commenting can still be a great way to build good quality links but for me that’s not the primary purpose. I prefer to approach it as a way of engaging with other bloggers in my niche and showing a little appreciation for their efforts. Taking a couple of minutes to craft a quality comment is a small price to pay for the great content they’ve shared with you. Anything less than that is frankly disrespectful.