Posted by SEO'd in 
The blogging world has literally exploded in the past few years. Everybody that I know and don’t know has a blog these days. If you own a new blog, you probably don’t get a whole lot of comments each day. You can always try the test methods (e.g. talk about controversial issues, break news, and ….) to change all that. You can also build your blog up gradually and before you know it your comments start to add up. But did you know that you’ll be leaking PR and link weight through your comments if you leave them Yes-Follow?
I personally prefer rewarding my readers with Yes Follow comments. In most cases anyway. Getting people involved on a brand new blog can prove to be difficult at first, but giving people an incentive to participate could help. But every time you do that, you get these messages:
If you are planning to allow Yes Follow comments on your blog, you need to make sure you don’t allow anyone to add comments to your blog without moderation. That would save you time and protects you against malicious comments such as the ones you see in the above image.
Blog spamming has always been encouraged by aggressive marketers. If you happen to go to one of their conferences, they talk about how they use scripts to automate the process, rotate comment title and link to avoid getting caught. The fact is, it’s not that hard to identify these bogus comments. Here is how I would approach the process:
- Allow everyone to comment on your blog.
- Everyone’s comments will stay in a queue before they are moderated.
- Comments that link to a spammy (low quality) website will be no-followed.
- Comments that link to an authority website (related to the topic of the post) will be left alone.
- Remove comments that link to Google, Yahoo, and Bing homepage. They are usually spam.
- Limit the number of outgoing links from each page (counting comments).
- Ban the IP and account of spammers.
- Watch out for trackbacks and advanced spam strategies.
- Close comments after a specific number of weeks or months.
- Use a moderation service such as Disqus to allow more comment formats such as Video, Audio, …
You can always no-follow all your comments. There are a lot of SEO professionals who recommend doing that. I personally prefer rewarding my readers as long as they don’t link to a banner farm or unrelated website. It certainly makes things more complicated, and you will have to do your due diligence to make sure you are not linking to a suspect territory. But that’s one of the challenges of blogging.
