Abhirupa Purkayastha – Simplifying Life

I hardly bothered about spam comments, I was more interested in writing blog posts and reading relevant comments. It was very recently that I asked this question to a good friend of mine (after all success is about asking right questions to the right people). He explained me in detail on how bad comments can harm a blog.

1. Search Engines are dumbos: Search engines can distinguish between comments and blog (we can easily assume that esp with popular blog formats like wordpress) but still search engines may not be willing to send its users to a page that has adult and unaccepted content (in form of comment). Earlier the problems were even bigger, as the links inside the comments were counted as votes from your website (thanks to the no-follow tag that stops the value leaking from our pages). Still, you don’t want to upset the search engines by providing some unaccepted comment about sex, viagra and illegal drugs on your valuable blog post. So keep you blog space clean to get better rankings in google and other search engines.
2. People don’t like to eat on the table where someone has already puked: Will you consider eating on a table where someone is puking? Certainly not! Same is true with your blog visitors, they don’t want to share the same space with spammers selling crap. They consider the blog totally neglected when they see unaccepted comments on the blog. There are many bloggers like Seth Godin, who does not even allow visitors to comment on his blog. So keep your blog space really clean to build a good reader base.

So these were the 2 reasons: Search Engines & your blog visitors.

He also explained me that there are valuable spams (Spams that are not by spammers but by real valuable people), so one needs to handle it carefully by informing the visitors before deleting their comments.

How to handle spam comments on your blog

• Prevention is better than cure: So restrict the spammers by making an automated spam difficult, there are capthca, re-capthca and mathematical calculation based capthcas. This should take care of a lot of spam comments. Leave the rest to akismet, it does a wonderful job. Even after that, if you receive spam comments then buddy congratulate them for being really smart and delete it with a great appreciation for the spammer ;).
• Cure: You get notification in email, so check it and delete it. Allow the first comment by a user to be moderated and let the rest of the comments by the same person appear automatically. Keep checking spams and delete them on regular basis. You can go to the comment section of your blog admin section and browse the latest comments.

So Enjoy blogging, enjoy spam comments 🙂 …. “More spam hits your blog, congratulate yourself for becoming more famous”