How A Blogger Should Moderate Blog Comments

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Guide For Blog Comment Moderation
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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.

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You will likely encounter someone commenting with a name which doesn’t look human at all.

Names like:

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.

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:

Comment Luv plugin leftover
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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:

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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:

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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:

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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!

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

38 thoughts on “How A Blogger Should Moderate Blog Comments”

  1. Jerry Lucas

    I agree that blog comments moderation is important to maintain quality control. I manually delete irrelevant, short, generic, “thank you” spam that does not add any value to my Colorado Notary Blog and does not mention any of the keywords of the blog post.

    I think there is an opportunity for a WordPress plugin that assigns a relevancy score to blog comments. Incoming comments that pass thru the spam filter could be scored and only high-quality relevant comments would be approved by the automated blog comment quality control filter, saving valuable time for busy bloggers.

  2. Frank

    Been looking for someone talking about fixing typos in blog comments because I feel iffy about doing it, but I want to! Glad to see you support it. I get comments that are sometimes absolutely atrocious with grammar and spelling, but the core thought of the comment is good. I usually fix all the typos, but sometimes I feel there is a dishonesty factor and maybe I would be best off just deleting them. I 100% agree that the messy comments would not represent my site at all, especially when I’m personally super neat with my writing.

  3. desyifa

    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.

  4. Manoj Joshi

    Thanks,
    Harsh
    I am using Akismet on my website and it is really helpful. Didn’t face any problem yet.
    What will happen if I won’t approve any comment? I can answer my readers on their email id.
    What do you say?

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Manoj
      Yes, you can do that.

  5. Rajiv Choudhary

    Hey Harsh,
    You saved me, man. I was going to enable Comment Luv on my blog but, I thought to search on your blog about it and I found it finally.
    Now, I am going to stay aways from comment Luv

  6. Mashood Ali

    I’ve been using Akismet on my website and till now it has helped me alot. Hasn’t faced any problem.

    Thankyou for the valuable article.

  7. Lokesh Tanwar

    Thank You Harsh for telling how to use Akismet for free, I was really irritated from Spam Comments
    But can you please let me know what is Commercial Use and What is Personal use of Akismet?
    If I am having adsense on my website would it be treated as Commercial Use?

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Hey Lokesh,

      Akismet has not defined what do they really mean by commercial. From my understanding, if you are running a personal blog, you should use the Free version. Commercial would mean a registered company.

  8. Akansha Shukla

    Sir, ShoutMeLoud is only one where I get the solution of all my confusion. Before to reading this post I was getting confused from this type irrelevant comment but today I know that’s actually made by bots.But also I have a one more confusion I’m using Akismet but sometimes comments left by same person is passed and sometimes comments from same person moved to spam. how is it possible?

  9. Mounish Sai

    Ultimate Post Harsh!

    First of all Thanks for writing such lovely Post! My blog is made in blogger platform. I am also considering about spam comments in my blog. My blog gets comments which contain rubbish links of their websites. I always “Remove content” of that comments in Blogger. Removing comments or Deleting the comments which is more SEO friendly?

  10. DREW

    You and I share similar views on comments in terms of spelling, grammar, etc. There’s nothing more annoying than having to sift through a pile of comments with poor spelling and grammatical errors. If I see a few errors, I generally just delete the comment; it saves me a lot of time.

    Unfortunately so many are misspelled that I sometimes take the time to edit the more meaningful, thoughtful comments. Thanks again for a nice guide.

  11. Tom

    Hi Harsh,

    I understand that moderating the comments is essential because there are 1000 seekers for your blog to comment on. This could result in a lot of spam. In such case, I too believe that one should always moderate the comments to remove the inappropriate comments.

  12. Nikhil Ganotra

    Hello Harsh,
    This was an amazing guide on what basis should we moderate comments. I am using Commentluv plugin from a very long time. Now I am planning to disable it. Is there any way to remove the extra words from below the comment?

    This thing may really harm the image of the blog. Thanks for making us aware of this thing.

    Have a nice week ahead 🙂

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