In the past, I’ve shared various guides on how to use comments as a blog marketing and promotion tool.
We also introduced you to the SEO benefits of blog comments
Today, I’m going to talk about some very important tips on how to manage blog comments.
Whether you are a new blogger or a seasoned blogger, we all make mistakes. I have made many of these mistakes myself, so I will share some tips based on my experience and learnings that I hope will help you.
Why Your Blog Comments Should Reflect Your Personality
I often mention in my articles:
- “Your blog is your personality”.
It should reflect your personality and traits. Likewise, the comments on your blog should reflect the seriousness and responsibility you take for every aspect of your blog. More on this later.
First, I want to share my first interaction with the review :
When I started blogging on BlogSpot, I didn’t know about blog comments. I started blogging out of curiosity and started writing about things I cared about.
One day, a guy named “Louis Vuitton Coupons” left a really nice review.
I jumped for joy!
I feel as though there are people reading what I write and they are getting value from my blog.
It's a great feeling.
I had no idea that these comments were created by automated software with the goal of gaining backlinks and that the only comments under my posts were from bots.
Over time, I began to understand what a “good” comment was and what a “bad” comment was. I started to take blog comment moderation seriously .
But robots are getting smarter all the time, and I’m still learning new things every day.
I also added the CommentLuv plugin to increase comments on my blog, but later removed it after learning about the many negative consequences it brought (which I will share below).
Initially, I would accept all comments like **“great article” ** *and * “thank you for posting” etc. After learning more about how to create a quality blog, I no longer accept these types of comments.
In this guide, I’ll share how you should accept comments on your blog, and what kinds of comments you should say no to.
How to Manage Blog Comments: The Definitive Guide for All Bloggers
Filter spam
Before entering the review area, please stay away from obvious spam comments.
If you are using WordPress, you should install the Akismet plugin to remove spam comments.
You may come across someone commenting with a name that doesn’t look human at all.
The names are as follows:
- SEO Audit
- “Best Blogging Tips”
- "Get Youtube fans" (note the spelling)
- …etc.
Don't accept these comments. Your blog is written by a person named "you", and you would probably prefer to get a real comment from another person named "you" .
(This is the policy I follow at ShoutMeLoud, and I recommend you do the same.)
Comment spam is a huge problem. Spammers use automated software to generate comments with backlinks pointing to their spammy sites. You definitely don’t want to be associated with them.
A basic characteristic of spam comments is that the comments are irrelevant to your blog post. The comments are usually general, such as: "Your blog does not load smoothly on mobile devices", "Your blog loads too fast" , etc.
Comments should be meaningful
As a blogger, when you write a blog post, you should expect valuable comments.
There are some loyal readers who are willing to recognize and appreciate blog posts by adding short comments such as; “Great post” and “Thanks for your article”.
These may boost your ego, but they won’t add any real value to your blog post.
I always feel that anyone can show their appreciation for a post by sharing it on social networks.
However, you should make an exception when writing a blog post that solves a problem , because comments like “It works!” and “Thanks, it helped me solve my problem” can serve as social endorsement.
Don't use CommentLuv plugin
I have used CommentLuv plugin before and it **is really useful for improving social sharing scores and getting more comments. But I don’t like **adding irrelevant links on my blog posts .
It’s certainly a great way to attract new commenters to your blog, but it’s not worth the high price tag in the long run. Not only will this plugin affect your blog’s bounce rate, it’ll also hurt your article’s overall SEO.
The image below shows what happens when you decide to disable the CommentLuv plugin after using it for a long time:
![Comment Luv plugin remaining]("Comment Luv plugin remaining")
Correct grammatical errors
Sometimes you’ll find comments filled with grammatical errors. I recommend correcting these mistakes before accepting comments on your blog . If your comment section has meaningful and readable comments, it will attract similar high-quality comments.
In a recent webmaster video, Matt Cutts suggested that you shouldn’t worry too much about grammatical errors in your comments, but I don’t agree with him.
I agree that you **shouldn't worry too much about this, but if you're * **picky * about quality like me , I'd recommend editing the comments and correcting grammar/spelling errors before posting them to your blog.
In the video below, Matt Cutts explains the importance of spelling and grammar in search engine rankings.
I’ve shared before about readability score as an on-page SEO ranking factor. However, a well-written review can also show what your blog’s readership is like.
From my testing, I’ve noticed that comments are very important for blog posts to rank well in search engines .
I think you should always make sure that the comments on your blog are of high quality. To make the life of blog commenters easier, you can add this plugin to enable comment editing.
Comments seeking irrelevant help
Sometimes you will receive irrelevant help comments on your blog posts .
I tend to ignore these comments because they make the entire blog post irrelevant. Especially when you are writing a high-quality blog post , you certainly want everything in the article to be relevant to the topic.
You can always answer readers' questions by sending an email.
Overall, your goal should be to make **every piece of information in your blog post **relevant and meaningful.
Sometimes people will copy and paste other blog posts into your blog comments, and you shouldn't accept them (to avoid DMCA complaints).
If you make any of the mistakes I mentioned above, I suggest you work on correcting them. From now on, you can moderate comments very carefully.
If you have any other suggestions or tips, please let me know in the comments.
Don’t forget to share these comment moderation tips with your blogging friends on Facebook and Twitter!
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