In the past, I (along with many other Shouters) have shared various guides on how to use commenting as a blog marketing and promotional tool.
We have also informed you about the SEO benefits of blog commenting
Today, I will be talking about some very important tips on how to moderate comments on your blog.
As a newbie or intermediate blogger, we all make mistakes. After making many of these mistakes myself, I’m going to be sharing some tips from my own learnings and experiences to help you out.
Why your blog comments should reflect your personality
I often mention in articles:
It should reflect who and what you are. Similarly, comments on your blog should reflect how seriously you take care of every aspect of your blog. More on this later.
Let me start off by sharing my first interaction with comments:
When I started blogging on a BlogSpot blog, I was unaware of blog comments. I started my blog out of curiosity and started writing stuff I cared about.
One day, some guy named “Louis Vuitton coupon” left a really nice comment.
I was jumping for joy!
I felt as if there were people reading what I was writing and they were getting value from my blog.
It was a great feeling.
I was not aware that such comments were created by automated software to gain backlinks, and the only comment on my post was from a bot.
With time, I started to understand what a “good” comment looked like, and what a “bad” comment looked like. I started becoming very serious about moderating comments on my blog.
But the bots are getting smarter all the time, and I’m still learning something new every day.
I also added the CommentLuv plugin to increase comments on my blog, but later, I removed it after understanding the many negative implications it had (I will share about this below).
Initially, I used to accept all comments like “Really nice post” and “Thanks for posting”. After learning more about creating a high-quality blog, I stopped accepting these kinds of comments.
In this guide, I will share how you should be accepting comments on your blog, and what kind of comments you should reject.
Note: To manage your social media channel comments, you can use SmartModeration. Read about it here. (Opens in a new tab.)
How to moderate blog comments: A definitive guide for all bloggers
Filter spam
Before you get into the moderation zone, start by keeping the obvious spam comments away.
If you are using WordPress, you should install the Akismet plugin to remove spam comments. This guide will teach you on how to get your free Akismet API key.
You will likely encounter someone commenting with a name which doesn’t look human at all.
Names like:
- “SEO review”
- “Best blogging tips”
- “Get Yuotube fans” (notice the spelling)
- …and so on.
Never accept these comments. Your blog is written by a human with a name – “You” – and you’d probably like to get a real comment from another human with a REAL name.
(This is the policy I follow here at ShoutMeLoud, and something I would suggest you to follow as well.)
Spam comments are a big problem. Spammers use automated software to generate comments with backlinks leading back to their spammy site. You don’t want to be associated with them in any way.
One of the basic signs of spam commenting is that the comment will not be relevant to your blog post. It will talk about something generic like: “Your blog is not loading fine on mobile”, “Your blog loading is too fast”, and so on.
I have compiled a huge list of such blog comments here, which you should definitely read. I bet some of them will make you smile.
- Also read: My comment is considered spam [Solution]
Comments should be meaningful
As a blogger, when you are writing a blog post, you should expect comments which add value.
There are loyal readers who would like to acknowledge and appreciate the blog post by adding quick comments like: “Nice post” and “Thank you for the post”.
These are good for an ego boost, but they don’t add any real value to your blog article.
I always feel like anyone can show appreciation for a post by sharing it on their social network.
But you should make an exception when writing a problem-solving blog post, as comments like: “It worked! and “Thanks, it helped me to fix my problem” act as a social acknowledgment.Don’t use the CommentLuv plugin
I have used the CommentLuv plugin in the past, and it works great to improve social sharing scores and get more comments. But I don’t like the idea of adding an irrelevant link onto a blog post.
It’s indeed a nice way to lure new commentors onto your blog, but it’s not worth the price you’re paying in the long run. Not only does this plugin affect your blog’s bounce rate, it’s bad for the overall SEO of your post.
Here is an image which shows what happens when you decide to disable the CommentLuv plugin after using it for a long time:
Correct grammatical mistakes
There are times when you will find comments full of grammatical mistakes. My suggestion for you is to correct those mistakes before accepting those comments on your blog. If your comments section show meaningful and readable comments, it will attract similar high-quality comments.
In a recent webmaster video, Matt Cutts suggested that you should not worry much about grammatical mistakes in comments, but I tend to differ with his opinion.
I agree that you should not worry much about it, but if you are quality paranoid like me, I would recommend you edit comments and correct grammatical/spelling errors before making them live on your blog.
This is the video where Matt shared his opinion on fixing grammatical errors in blog comments:
And in the below video, Matt Cutts explains how spelling and grammar matters in search engine ranking.
I have previously shared about readability scores which is one of the on-page SEO ranking factors. Nonetheless, a well-written comment also shows what kind of demographic is reading your blog.
Do notice the part where Matt explains about how to judge a reputable site:
From my testing, I have noticed that comments matter a lot for better search engine ranking of your blog posts.
I believe that you should always ensure that the comments on your blog are of high-quality. To make life easier for your blog commentor, you can add this plugin to enable comment editing.
Comments asking for irrelevant help
There are times when you will get irrelevant help comments on your blog posts.
I prefer to not accept those comments, as they will make the entire blog post irrelevant. Especially when you are creating a high-quality post, you want everything on the post to be relevant.
You can always take care of your reader’s query by sending them an email.
Overall, your target should be keeping every piece of information on your blog post relevant and meaningful.
Watch the video:
There are also times when people copy-paste other blog posts into your blog comments, and you should not accept them (to avoid DMCA complaints).
If you have been making any of the mistakes that I’ve mentioned above, I suggest you work on correcting them. From now on, you can moderate comments with the utmost care.
If you have any other suggestions or tips, do let me know via the comments.
Don’t forget to share these tips for comment moderation with your blogger friends on Facebook and Twitter!
Thank you sir for this informative guide. Me and many other bloggers found it very useful and this also tells the importance of comments on a blog. Earlier I thought that posts are the only most important thing on any blog. But here at Shoutmeloud I found how important other elements are for your blog.
Recently I started a new blog and like always I moderated every single comment. I put up some comment guidelines that’s viewable to guests only to follow. It’s short and simple guidelines to follow to an approved comment and yet people break the rules.
I knew it was either a robot or some loser SEO expert trying to get a keyword backlink for there clients domain with keyword stuff in the title. I may not get that many comments but I will approve them if they follow my simple guidelines and actually show me that they read the blog post when they respond.
I’d rather have 2 comments a month then 40 of useless replies from mostly non humans or useless SEO’s who don’t understand how to use the comment system to there advantage.
Great write up btw. When someone replies to a blog post of mine, I hope they actually use there real name because I like to reply back to them addressing them by there name. In real life I don’t reply to one of my employees (I’m a team lead btw) and address them by there employee ID number. It’s unprofessional to do that. Talk to your commenters like you was talking to them face to face.
@Derek
One thing which I suggest to all these Shouters, don’t get annoyed by spam comments. If you flush 100 spam comments, another 1000 is waiting to land. So use proper anti-spam system like G.A.S.P + Akismet and focus on all those valuable comments which you get on your blog. Thanks for dropping by and for adding value here.
You have chosen a very apt topic for discussion…I am seeing discussion on this topic for the first time….To manage the comments from the your visitors is very important…I feel it is more important than even the social media…Your comment on commentluv looks reasonable…I did not know this aspect of commentluv…
Hi Harsh,
A Newbie Shouter appricate your help to let us know about commenting section on Worpress. I am a regular reader of Shoutmeloud.com, shoutmetech.com and your other blogs. Your blog speaks like your are in front of me and teaching me.
Thank You Again Harsh
Hi Harsh,
I think, initially when you start a new blog, it maybe okay to approve comments like ”Nice post”, ”Thanks for your post”, ”Great post”, etc because you don’t have any comments at all. Once you start recieving normal comments, then you need not approve meaningless comments.
“louis vuitton coupon” – I got 10 comments on this topic on exactly one single blog post, daily. I wanted to see how long a bot would keep posting/comment flooding. They did it for more than a week and I had hundreds of “louis vuitton coupon” spam comments stuck in the spam queue. Some time ago, I shared how I blocked this spammer’s IPs, in a blog post. They somehow must have got through my G.A.S.P. plugin, everytime.
Your point about removing commentluv is very valid. Had never thought that way. That sure is comment luv, but it takes the luv away from your blog. I’ll consider removing the plugin.
Good post on blog comment moderation Harsh 🙂
Am using Akismet plugin and it helps me to filter out the spam comments. I never leave a one line comment to anywhere and strongly hate the concept of doing it just for the sake of backlinks.
It is really shocking to hear about the Commentluv plugin, coz am using it. Will remove it soon. I do agree with your last point, even I too refuse those types of irrelevant comments.
Thanks for this useful post Harsh, hope it would be a beneficial stuff for your readers.
“One day some guy name “louis vuitton coupon” commented saying really nice comment. I was jumping with joy, as I felt there are people reading what I’m writing and it was a great feeling”
LOL I believe it happened to most of the new bloggers. Even some of them replied that “Thanks for the appreciation” 🙂 🙂
“Comments should be meaningful”
Yes. The blogger should not encourage comments like nice post, good post etc. Healthy discussion will be always useful and worth.
“Nice” article Harsh 🙂
BTW Earlier you had Google+ comment system. It seems you have removed now. Any particular reason?
I learned from experience that there are spammers trolling blogs leaving simple, useless generic comments for back-links and nothing more. I wrote a post titled Before You Comment and for a while placed a link to it at the end of every blog post. The comment system I use has a field that allows me to put a note above the comment form which I inform readers about my comment policy. If they don’t pay attention to the policy I won’t publish their comment.
If you met someone and had a conversation with them you would introduce yourself by name, not by your occupation or with a sales pitch. I apply this same rule of courteous behavior to my blog.
@Harsh
I agree with those spam measures. When I launched my new blog, I removed the “website” field from the comment system. That took away some spam. lol
I am testing this out to see if I will get real comments with the “website” field not available.
Hello Harsh
Thanks for sharing your knowledge. i appreciate you. New blogger are confused about blog commenting proper. commenting to be meaningful and related to the post. spamming content always make negative value.
Hi Harsh,
What you have written in this post is exactly what I have experience when I first started my blog. The one which you have mentioned “louis vuitton coupon” had sent me comments which I also accept at first. But as I knew more about blogging I realized that it was a spam comment and I later removed that. Your article has provided me more insight for comment moderation.
Thanks and Regards.
Hi Harsh,
I’m happy that I came across with your site this article is on point, I do believe that blog commenting does take some work but with some patience everything with come into place. Also I do feel that providing the right information to your readers is a important aspect if you want your views to gain trust towards you.
So Harsh, thanks again and have a great day.
Antonio
Yeah! You’re right. After installing commentluv system I saw a lot of comments on my blog articles. I used to be very excited but after reading some comments. But after reading this article I check my approved comments again and saw most of them were normal comments and weren’t related to the blog article. So right now I deleted all those comments which weren’t related to the article and had name of some website instead of real name. Thank You! Harsh. Will definitely share on social networks
Hi Harsh, you open my eyes to things what I haven’t even thought of or cared about. I only started a blog so I’m learning really.
First I thought leaving a comment like great post or looking great is a nice comment to appreciate. Well reading your post sounds not so and I can now understand. I think it looks “just trying to” or zabardasti types (if I may use the word?).
In my blog I’m not started to moderate comments because I hardly get any anyways. Grammatical mistakes? Well I thought it looked more real but SEO and demographics – ah!! never thought of that.
You are a genius. You already know that I know. 🙂 Thanks.
Great info about comment moderation. Still i get some spam comments which are look like real ones.Most of the people try to insert link into the text and post into comments section.In blogger there is no chance to edit comments.That’s why i shifted to discus commenting system.It gives an option to edit comments.If i feel comment is good and it has a bad link then i remove the link and moderate comment.
3 years ago I’m a beginner on SEO and i Don’t know about why visitors write big comments,
that times i have write many this type comments “ nice post” “Thanks for posting” , 1 year after created a blog and passed many months in my blogging carrier but no one commented on my blog posts and sometimes get one visitor Now I’m focus learning about SEO and I know importance of Writing Quality comments. Harsh, Another Wonderful topic 🙂 .
Great Tips for commenting!!! Thanks Harsh!!! I also want to know which is better: Third party comment plugin of default wordpress commenting system?
Hi Amey:- In my opinion, for a commenting system you should select 3rd part plugins as it provided more features and provides more security than the default one.
Hello Harsh,
Blog commenting has always been the most crucial part I had ever experienced in all through my blogging Life. Yes It is true when you get Comments like “Well Done” and “Awesome Post” It boosts up your confidence but surely it is going to increase your bounce rate.
I remember that Once I also got a query regarding “Grammatical Mistakes” and I also replied to that person to improve his English (as he was supposed to write in English) because It is having a very good impact over others who are strictly looking for quality and nothing else.
Also coming to the main point… Google is being converted from machine to human being which is resulting in the rankings of only quality articles to be ranked on the top. Comments do have a very important role if you talk about Search Engine Rankings..
Thanks for such a detailed and awesome post brother.
Have a good time.
Cheers
Rohit
Well, it’s the problem when using WordPress and others. You get pros and cons. Good thing is that it’s usable in few ours, time to find a nice template but hackers study the code to find the gap and most importantly as you noticed, people are looking for particular “footprint” like “Powered by WordPress” plus the keyword they need. 5% of them will come on your site personally and comment themselves, so in that case, no problem, but 95% of the time, they send their Bot doing it for them and after you get comments like you explained before 😉
A great post Harsh.
After I start my website, I thought commenting on blog is an useless habit. But, I found the Shoutmeloud blog from Google Search results, I understood the importance of commenting on blogs. Everyday, you put posts that are really useful for me. Thank you Harsh. I really appreciate you.
Hi Harsh, First of all thanks to use my comment as as image in your new blog post. I have a questions to you, when some one comments on my blog? Those comments are sometimes goes straight into the spam folder, while when I check those comments in the spam folder, I found that those comments are relevant to my blog posts and always add some value to improve my blog posts. Can you please suggest you me a link, through which I can identify what is actually a spam comment or or not. I have installed akismet plugins in my blog.