Commenting for the Future
I’ve been on a bit of a anti-commenting binge recently, mainly with the amount of spam coming through - Akismet deals with a good percentage, but I really reached the point where I had to have a commenting policy for all the “Keyword Links” being set by people on variety of my blogs.
These people add their comment invariably just to get a one-way link to their site for SEO purposes - what they forget is that quite often it’s permanent as Maki quite rightly reminds them.
The behaviors this has introduced to get these links are not always healthy for your long term brand management (yes, you yourself are a brand!):
- Only commenting on doFollow blogs (not necessarily a bad thing - it is a form of community!)
- Being the first to comment, but commenting with something completely irrelevant.
Maki explains that it’s not just about getting a link to your site, it’s about opening a dialogue with the author and their readers. People with short term goals tend to cut and paste the same response, or say something irrelevant let me give you an example:
One comment I had this week complained about having to read my blog - quite simply, don’t bother if you’re not interested. Clearly they weren’t interested because their name was something irrelevant like “Bahama Holidays”. Needless to say I deleted it!
I’ll leave you with Maki’s final comment on this:
Think long-term, think relationships and think about getting repeat benefits.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t use DoFollow but I do use Top Commentator which does followed links. I had to do a modification to it to prevent gaming of it by some spammers though.
I get my share of automated spam comments, particular since the last couple of PR updates. I’ll generally allow an anchored link comment as long as the comment offered is meaningful and on-topic and the site that was linked isn’t a bad neighborhood site.
Hi Frank,
That sounds like another sensible approach! Although so many of these type of things need modifying to stop the spammers gaming the system.
Now a plugin that identified bad neighborhoods - there’s an idea!!
[...] Commenting for the Future [...]
Thanks for visiting and thanks *very much* for editing my link-back on your comments! I don’t know if I would have ever thought of editing down the ones I get had I not seen you do it. I get some really random ones so this will definitely help. I’ve learned my thing for the day! AMVA
Hi Amanda,
No problem! I think the long term approach of getting into dialogue with other bloggers has far more long-term benefits than simply a “one-liner”.
[...] Commenting for the Future [...]
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