Leaving unmoderated comments? Think again

Comments are the basic social feature that most of the sites provide. A comment allows interaction between visitor and owner of website.

However, comments pose a danger for website owner as well, especially when they are not moderated for spam. This is often forgotten by small website owners that install blogging platforms with basic configuration. And it might lead to loss of visitors and rankings.

1. Spam comments show that you do not read your own blog/site and do not care, so why search engines and visitors should care as well?

2. Spam comments might include porn keywords or link to bad sites, which is bad despite “nofollow” attribute.

3. Non-moderating comments might lead to missing hacker attacks.

4. You miss a chance to interact with your visitors

Although missing a chance to talk with your visitors is the most important thing in the site, but other points are important as well. Quality of comment moderation is one of the signs of site quality and authority, which is always important in rankings and customer retention. Just think for yourself if you would want using site with lots of comments that advertise other projects?

Leaving bad keywords and links in the comments of the page might lead to your site being banned or listed as malware site. You are responsible over ads displayed in your site as well, but that is different topic. Thus a link in comment body should be a) connected to the topic of the post b) do not link to objectionable content, even if the link is nofollow one. Keywords in nofollow links could still hurt your page authority even if the links are not indexed.

Now good moderation does not mean deletion of comments expressing different opinion than the one of the owners of site. As long as it is polite, I would not recommend deleting a comment. Same goes with people linking to their website if their input is valuable. This is completely ok and it will not hurt your rankings.

How you implement your comment moderation strategy is purely up to you. You might rely on akismet or some other spam database, though in the end you will have to review most of comments manually. Just remember – captcha will protect from bots, but not from human spammers.