Blog Commenting – Spam vs. Trash
Apr 28th, 2010 | By Val | Category: Internet MarketingThank you for coming back to visit us! Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more information.
Loretta started a conversation about spam comments on Monday with her post of How NOT to Leave a Comment On a Blog. My friend is far much nicer and more lenient than I am. Maybe that’s why some of her blogs/sites are higher ranked than mine? lol Now just like her post, this is a posting based on opinion and my years experience online. Including over 6 years of blogging alone.
When working in wordpress there are two different ways to deal with comments that you don’t want on your site. Send it to spam or click it to trash.
Trash in my opinion is for those comments that are just pretty lame. It’s not really a canned response. It may not be totally ridden with links and keywords. But it’s basically saying something like “great comment, looking forward to more”. Ok, bad example, that is totally one of the comments I get all the time. lol But I get so many it’s not easy to come up with something that is more of a trash comment.
I guess going with the trash click instead means I don’t think they really had any spammy intent. It’s very much a personal opinion. There are times that I will go in and edit a comment to take out a link in their reply. If it is something that looks like it took some time to write out, then I will probably send it to trash instead of spam if you are obviously just putting up an ad.
But spam doesn’t leave a lot of room for gray in my book. Not using your name, using keywords and links in your name area? Clicked to spam, no passing go, no collecting $200. Comments that don’t have much to do with my post? You go to spam. Yeah, don’t talk about food and recipes on my scrapbook blog. That’s just not going to be a fit I can try and skip by. It means you stopped by just to spam my blog and you didn’t read anything including the name.
Now all this negative talk sounds like I’m not very friendly, which is the exact opposite. There are very few commenters on all of my sites/blogs that don’t get a return comment. If you took the time to leave an appropriate comment, I’m sure to go off to your blog and find a post to reply on. A reply with useful information or pointing out how your useful information was helpful to me. I’ll put some thought into it. Heck, if your site is helpful, I may leave it in your comment on one of my sites or better yet, I just may do a quick review post. It just depends on how you comment and your intent.
I’m all about what comes-around goes-around. I don’t comment unless I have something good to add. Even if it’s truly a thank you for their post, I will add that I did ‘blank’ because of their post. Not with a link to what I did, but just a thank you on how it inspired me. I guess I’m strict about the comments on my posts because I expect others to put some effort into their marketing. I put effort into my comments or I don’t comment. I expect the same in return.
Great post Val! It seems that a lot of us bloggers are talking about this topic this past week. I wrote an article last week called Business & Blogging – The Benefits of making meaningful blog comments. I wrote the article because I was tired of getting nonsense comments, trash comments and spam comments and I pretty much moderate all blog comments now.
Recently I have seen a rash of blog comments from spammers that are simply copy & pastes of someone elses comment on your blog post…drives me nuts…but all of those get deleted and never get through the front door on our blogs.
Shel
Shelly´s last blog ..Illegal Interview Questions The Interviewer Can’t Ask You
Shelly, I AM GETTING THOSE TOO! The first one caught me off guard as it was answering a question and it sounded good. Well of course it did. I WROTE IT! lol They had copy/pasted one of my replies. My spam plugins do a pretty good job of catching things so I can approve questionable comments.
Thank goodness for comment moderation, but I wish there was an app that would delete the legit and obvious spam for me.
Spam for me is pretty clear cut. For example, leaving comments on a post that has no relevance, weird names, their links having nothing to do with my blog etc. The copy and paste ones caught me off guard too and the thing is when you click on their link, there’s nothing on their blog/site, so I don’t get where the benefit is for them.
As for trash…anything that is spam.
Sophia´s last blog ..Illegal Interview Questions The Interviewer Can’t Ask You
Sophia, it would be awesome if once you put it in the spam folder it remembered and just fully deleted it next time they tried. So I didn’t even have to go and delete my spam folder. (sigh) we can only hope and wait for that plugin huh? lol Thanks for commenting you two
Hi Val
I’m new to Wordpress. I have to say it’s great to be able to moderate comments so easily and it’s amazing how many of them are absolute spam. They don’t even use thier own names do they? Wow. What a learning curve.
What get’s me is why do they bother in the first place. It must take them hours to go round searching for blogs and posts to add their spammy stuff to. Maybe it’s worth it it to them if thousands of blogs don’t moderate comments. I suppose there are trash blogs out there to so they would probably welcome all the spam comments if it takes them higher up in search. Does it take blogs higher up in search with lots of comments?
I would have thought that google would learn to recognize how many times a commenter is sent to spam and then automate soem kind of block … but it’s probably to difficult and would have repercusions for others somewhere down the line eh?
Thanks for the post BTW.
Karen
Karen´s last blog ..A global perspective to the challenge of motivating people
There are programs out there that will do this for them. The backlinks can be a big help in SEO, but since the sites are spammy to begin with I’ll never understand how it would matter. lol I have one site that I need to go back through all my old comments and take out the url. I’m sure it’s the reason it gets hit so much. The comments are usually relevant is the sad part. I don’t delete everyone’s url, but this one site sends me comments a lot and always puts keywords in the name section.