Do You Approve Spam Comments?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, July 17, 2009 Comments (2)

From time to time here at Search Engine Optimization Journal we get a comment that looks decent and could have been made by anyone who wants to contribute to a discussion but the name on the comment is something like

Big Buddy SEO

Internet Marketing Clown

or Link Building God

These are obvious ploys to snag an inbound link from a cheap comment. Sometimes the comments are good and sometimes they’re not. But the effect is always the same: Comment Spam. Do you approve them?

Some bloggers have stopped approving such comments altogether. Even if the comment is a good comment. Some bloggers will approve the comment if it’s a good comment, but not approve it if it isn’t a good one or if it doesn’t contribute to the discussion. Some will approve the comment, but edit out the link. That way the blog owner gets the SEO benefit for the comment and Link Building God keywords, but the commentator doesn’t get any benefit.

My question to you is this, as a blog owner, do you approve those kinds of comments, spam or otherwise?

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2 Comments

Made Friday, 17 of July , 2009 at 3:16 pm

If it looks like spam, smells like spam …

I just delete it and move on with my life. Zero tolerance spam policy is the best way to go. This way, if you accidentally delete something that was not spam, the user will (likely) contact you and ask why it was deleted. You can ask them to post again without the offending links and the problem is solved.

The thing is, this almost never happens because the comment was indeed spam.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Friday, 17 of July , 2009 at 3:50 pm

Hi Brandon,

No spam policy is ALWAYS the way to go! That is very true about comments that are accidentally deleted, I never actually thought about it though…

Anyway, thanks for reading and your comment