Who’s Moderating For The Search Engines?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

I read an interesting post this morning, the premise of which was that bloggers are manual moderators for the search engines. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I suppose it’s also true of forum moderators, wiki managers, and others who are in a position to approve user generated content and posts.

To what extent are bloggers and forum moderators also moderators for the search engines? To the extent that you approve links that the search engines use to influence rankings. In other words, if you have dofollow links from your web property to anyone else’s web property then you are helping the search engines do their job. That’s a heavy responsibility.

The point is this: You should be diligent in approving user generated content that is helpful and beneficial, not just to you and the commenter, but to your site visitors. In doing that, you are giving voice to the search engines your approval to those sites you link to. If you don’t approve of a site then you shouldn’t link to it. Approve the comment and delete the link or just don’t approve the comment. You’re not obligated to approve a comment because someone left it. But if your site visitors would like to read the comment then by all means let them. The search reward good behavior and punish the bad; you’re there to help them.