Should You Approve Spam Comments On Your Blog?
Spam comments can be a pain in the rump. They can take up a lot of time to sort through and delete. But should you delete them all?
I say you should delete most of them, but you might want to save a few. But which ones?
Of course, you want to delete any spam comments that are not related to your product or service niche. If you sell automotive services, for instance, you wouldn’t want to approve any comments from spammers selling insurance or viagra. But should you automatically approve all the spam comments related to automotive services? Not necessarily.
I would not approve any of the following type of spam comments at all:
- Comments from insurance companies, gambling sites, porn sites, or viagra
- Spam comments left by your competition
- Comments from anonymous commenters
- That link to 404 pages or nonexistent websites
- Comments that appear as trackbacks but that do not link back to your blog from the site when you visit them (be sure you visit the website of all your commenters to see who is linking to you)
- One line comments that contain no substance
- Comments that contain excessive links within them
So what kind of spam comments, if any, should you approve?
If you get a spam comment that you know is spam but that uses your keywords and that don’t link back to any dangerous websites or neighborhoods then you can go ahead and approve the comments. The keywords will help you in the rankings and the additional content is a positive for your website. It’s an editorial judgment and I’m not saying that you should approve those comments. I’m just saying you shouldn’t see any harm to your site if you do, and if you don’t have too many of them.
5 Responses to “Should You Approve Spam Comments On Your Blog?”
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Unless your website is selling viagra or w.o.w accounts its unlikely that a spammer is going to post anything relevant to your keywords. I think any spam just makes a site look unprofessional and not maintained.
* Comments from insurance companies, gambling sites, porn sites, or viagra
* Spam comments left by your competition
* Comments from anonymous commenters
* That link to 404 pages or nonexistent websites
* Comments that appear as trackbacks but that do not link back to your blog from the site when you visit them (be sure you visit the website of all your commenters to see who is linking to you)
* One line comments that contain no substance
* Comments that contain excessive links within them
There is some other kind of spam? I agree with Neal: if it doesn’t add to the discussion, it takes away from it. The trivial amount of ‘link luv’ that a spam comment might pass along is greatly outweighed by the disservice I do to my readers when I leave it laying around for them to stumble over.
Nope … I get rid of the junk. ALL of it.
What about the reverse. By this I mean the person that does leave a valid, and sometimes valuable comment, but their link is to a totally unrelated, or perhaps even unwanted, site or uses a keyword like viagra as the link?
Would you edit the link out and leave the comment?
les
Hi Les,
It really depends, most viagra linked comments normally have nothing valid to say. Either way, I would delete the spam comment…
I always get rid of SPAM! It’s just so irritating.
Andrew Goulding