Blog Commenting Tips Are Utterly Ridiculous
By admin on Apr 15, 2008 in Blog Marketing
Everyone knows leaving comments on related blogs is a way to send relatively small amounts of traffic to your blog and can be a good way to get some attention in the early days of your blogs life, as well as possibly gaining some backlinks if the blog is a DoFollow blog.
Surely everyone who knows that is intelligent enough to realize that if they leave more attention grabbing comments they will receive more traffic and that by leaving a stupid comment they could damage their reputation.
No one needs help with that.
I’e seen 2 posts recently on popular blogs that give out tips for “how you should (or should not) comment” and I must say the reading these posts makes me think the authors are stuck in their own crazy little world.
There is no need to hide in the dark, I’d rather be open with who thinks what.
On caroline-middlebrook.com she attacks a commentor who had left rather average comments only 1 sentence long:
“It looks like he was trying to get a backlink by jumping to the top of my Top Commentator plugin because he left just enough comments to surpass Mark Mason who is currently top of the list. I see people do this quite often and it always raises an eyebrow. However the key question that I ask as a blog owner is “does this comment provide any value to my readers?”
(emphasis is mine)
Why I Disagree With Caroline On This One
- The purpose of the top commentator plugin is to encourage comments by offering them free promotion. The free promotion is the motive behind the comment. If you don’t want people to leave comments the way they do, take the plugin it down.
- The comments don’t have to provide value to your readers. They are the voice of your readers.
In addition, not everyone who leaves a blog comment is a marketer trying to gain traffic. Some people just want to say they found something funny or interesting and shouldn’t be required to “add value”. I very rarely leave comments with the purpose to drive traffic anymore. If something I read makes me want to comment, I comment.
Which is more spammy, a lengthy knowledgeable comment made by a marketer with the intent to drive traffic or a “LOL that was hilarious!” from an innocent passer by? Surely the comment left by the marketer is the closest to spam.
Censoring what people say on your blog because it “doesn’t provide value to your readers” is nuts - the commentors ARE your readers! It is the blog authors job to provide value, let the readers say what they like.
I agree, this is why I left the comment I did on her post. I think you said it best when you said that “not every comment is from a marketer looking to gain traffic”.
I like Caroline’s blog but sometimes there is an arrogance about her writing style.
Yes, sometimes its just a passer by wanting to show they exist and appreciate what they just saw.
Nice post.
lol
[…] Blog Commenting Tips Are Utterly Ridiculous […]
If I think the comment has shady motives i simply remove the url from the comment but leave their name.
the comments stays but the linkback goes. end of story
A simple but effective policy
@WordPress Modder
That was funny!
@ Matt
It is usually hard to judge the commentors motives, so unless they are obvious spam I publish the comments.
There have been times when I have approved a comment, then received the same comment on multiple posts from the same person and figured out it was spam and removed. However, one sentence comments aren’t always bad.
I like to comment to entertain myself some times. It’s entertaining to get comments back or for me to see some of the cities around the world clicking on my site just because I left a comment on someone else’s.
I’m not doing it for the sole purpose to drive traffic.Because once I get them to my site. I don’t have any real way to monitize it. Again I just think it’s neat to see where people are from.
Extremely well said! People who leave short responses just for the sake of commenting on as many blogs as well, without reading the posts, to get backlinks and traffic are spammers. But some people leave short responses just because they want to thank the blogger for their great article, end of story. It doesn’t mean that they’re spammers as well.
I also like how you mentioned that the reader’s comment shouldn’t have to provide value to the OTHER readers - that’s just ridiculous.
Hah, it seems like Caroline Middlebrook is being called out a lot lately.
[…] Blog Commenting Tips Are Utterly Ridiculous at Blogging Fingers. […]
Matt,
I agree with you about the top commentator plugin. It’s a way to reward people for placing comments. It doesn’t have a filter in place for judging the quality of the comments, just the number.
Using the plugin essentially sets up a contest, and the most comments win.
I think you’re only kind of right, here. First of all, Caroline seems to have been commenting on what is wrong with the strategy of building trafic through leaving inane comments. SHe’s clear that she rarely deletes comments, even short ones — but the comments she highlights clearly were *not* just drive-by compliments.
I think you’re right about the purpose of the top commenters plugin, though I’m sure we’d all much rather it functioned simply to reward authentic commenters, rather than people trying to “get to the top” by any means necessary. Still, it was probably a mistake to assume that it *would* work the way we’d *like* it to work — and in the comments at Middlebrook’s blog, there’s a healthy discussion about that.
Beyond that, there’s a deeper issue. I think you’re right that the purpose of comments is not to provide value to other readers. But what *is* the purpose of comments? I think it has to be a way to add value to the *conversation*. We could let people tell us “you look nice today” with a much simpler mechanism than commenting, without opening our sites up to the threats of spam, flame wars, etc., by just putting up a digg-like button. Every click would be a “Good advice” registered and appreciated.
I’m not sure it’s too high a bar to expect thoughtful responses in comments. I think it shows a pretty healthy respect for readers to say “Here you go, have your say — I expect it will be something thoughtful, because I know my readers are smart, thoughtful people.”
“But what *is* the purpose of comments? I think it has to be a way to add value to the *conversation*”
I don’t think it’s even as profound as that, its just a way for readers to respond in whatever way they want to.
I think it’s all a matter of perspective: I am a small blogger, my project gets few comments, I am still working on promoting it and maybe draw in some more people who’d be interested in my work.
For me any comment (as long as it’s not utter spam or swearing) is just great. For this I have the top commentators plugin and I am happy to see people come and comment and why not, battle for that top spot.
Still, after the blog is growing, so do the expectations for the commenters. The blogger knows his/her blog is already a source of potential good traffic for the commenters and this makes some be more willing to diss anyone who’s not getting into their quality limits they set now, since at first any comment was good comment.
It’s something like “equality, but not for all”. I know some comments that are too short might be a tad frustrating since you’d expect some info, but as you said, maybe it’s just a visitor who’s pleased to read a good article and wanted you to know that. On the other hand, getting on the top list means that innocent visitor kinda knows the drill of the top commenters and was on a posting spree.
Maybe some guidelines would be good for such bloggers who want more quality commenting. I assume I’d do this too, if a normal comment wouldn’t suffice anymore. Don’t know .. never was in this position.
Yes ultimately its up to the blogger to make the choice, but the top-commentor plugin rewards most regular commentor, not necessarily the one who comments with the highest number of words.
Right on Matt. I don’t really mind one-liners as long as they are not spam.
If a reader wants to add value to the discussion, cool. But if they only want to let me know that they found the post useful or funny, they are also most welcome.
Matt, you probably receive comments like this “I just want to say that I really enjoy reading your posts. Best regards…”. Aksimet marks this as a spam comment. There are two options:
- the comment is written by someone who likes your blog
- the comment is pasted from clipboard, person who wrote that comment sends same comments to other blogs in order to receive traffic.
Well, this comment can be treated as spam, because it is not useful for other readers, it is not related to subject of your post and it will not initiate any conversation. But, it is also a polite spam, and if you just started blogging it is nice to see that someone actually visited your blog. That’s the reason why I approved similar comment on my blog. But when you receive many comments you need to be more selective.
In that case I look at who left it and what their sites URL is. If it has been marked as spam by Aksimet it probably isn’t any good.
Hello, i guess this is as good of a place as any to post and let you know. I went to subscribe to your RSS feed, and when i clicked it i got an error that said “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING” followed by other gibberish that scrolled off the screen. I had to force the page to stop loading because it locked up my browser. Cheers.
Thanks for the article! Just browsing around online I get into some cool stuff. Anyways, back to school work…