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Commenting on Blogs: Are You Making Your Mark or Marring It?

Yesterday night, Ms Judith posted this comment on my blog post on using colons correctly in writing: "Colon cleanse, the importance of liver detoxification, and the need for multi-vitamins, plus much more. There are choices on the products and a seasonalcolon cleanse and liver cleanse is necessary. We do not get the nutrients we need in our food anymore."

Ms Judith placed a link to her site on colon cleanser as well.

Today, another person, who calls himself (or herself) ‘Slang Words’ commented on my post on popular idioms and usages: “Well thanks for this wonderful to learn more slangs I want to recommend a good collection of Slang Dictionaries presents you with a vast array of slang words and expressions, ranging from older and internationally recognized slangs to modern day coinages, colloquialisms, vulgarities and many other substandard usages of the English language.”

He also placed a link back to his slang words site, with that anchor text, ruthlessly.

I rejected both comments promptly and even wrote a mail to Ms Judith about it, asking her not to post such comments anymore.

I know of the time, when people are desperate about getting backlinks to their blogs or websites. They engage people to comment to DoFollow blogs and get backlinks from those comments, obviously to optimize their sites better for search engines.

These people don’t realize the wastage of time. Their procedure is thus: Find out the best DoFollow search engine-> Search for their main keyword-> Comment on the resulting blog with their link and a bunch of keywords without knowing shit or Shinola about the blog post -> And go in search for other such blogs.

I will tell you why this is not going to work. Look at the comment made by Ms Judith. She thought that I wrote about the greater part of the large intestine in my post about using colon in punctuation correctly. She didn’t even take the trouble to read one or two first sentences on this post before showcasing her keyword-rich comment with a shameless backlink.

The second comment may be regarded as better. It is at least a little considerate of the post, and said “Thanks for this”. But placing such one liners with a backlink is not the correct way of commenting.

Your comments, if they appear on popular blogs, will hold any benefit. But the popular bloggers are very particular about the comments they receive and have a strict comment policy. Unless your comment is at least one big paragraph long and has any valuable content, it will definitely not see the light of the day. If you are commenting just for a backlink to an irrelevant page, then don’t even think about it; rest assured, it won’t be published.

A good commenter adds value to the post he comments on. He comments after reading or having a brief overview of the post and makes it speak his own voice about the post. If such a comment has a very relevant backlink to any of the commenter’s websites, then it will be published and may even be rated high.

With that, I am stepping up the comment policy of this blog, and any comment that doesn’t add value to the post will not be published. Also, if you comment just for the sake of backlinks, it is not going to see the light of the day.

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008

Comments

  1. These kind of comments on my blog waste so much of my time. Sometimes it's hard to decide if the comment should be approved or not, but I generally delete comments like "thanks" or "great post." And, of course, the colon comment would not be approved. Recently, I approved a comment that appeared legitimate. The next day, I had about 20 comments from the same person—I only require moderation of the first comment. Every comment was actually a copy of an earlier comment by someone else on the same post. I had to go through and delete every one of them. I agree with your comment policy.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lillie, Thanks a lot for your comment. It's really great to know that you are reading my posts.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I support your comment policy, Lenin. I read a lot of blogs, but I only comment when I've got to say something. I've been reading some blogs where the comments section really shows a kind of conversation, a kind of community, and I think that's the way it should be.
    I keep my fingers crossed for your monitor!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you very much Ulla, for the comment. I am very happy that you expressed my own idea of comments being a thread of conversation.

    I have a glad news to share. The monitor has been fixed this morning. And I am happy that you mentioned it. Thanks for being considerate.

    ReplyDelete

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