Fairy Blog Mother
When your blog is new, there is nothing more exciting than getting a comment! It not only proves that people are reading your posts, but that they like them enough to want to respond.
Of course the more you write, the kind of relevant post subjects you offer, and the more people who read your blog, the more likely you will get comments. The audience ratio will vary depending on where your blog is geographically – obviously American blogs get more comments because there is a culture to perform online interaction and activity.
But should you approve all your comments? Obviously special applications like Akismet (which I call my trusty spam-eater) will seek out and separate spam comments, either by dumping them in the spam folder, or offering them for moderation (administrator’s approval). Some it will ferret away without you having to consider them.
Spam (or as it should be better known as inappropriate viral marketing) is recognised as either a comment that has nothing to do with your post’s subject, or is an annoying comment like ‘Nice post’. Be aware of the ones that seem to be complimentary, they may contain links to their own websites or blogs that you may not approve of. A lot of spam, either human or robot generated, is about link building and getting more traffic to their sites. Read each carefully before approving them, to make sure they are suitable.
If you want to know whether to accept the comment, check out the destination of the commenter’s website or blog. Every comment will contain a link to the commentator’s email address and their website or blog, and you should check them (Akismet will weed out the offensive ones) before deciding to publish their comment. Once the comment is live, the link to their website is live also, helping them with SEO and inbound links to boost their ratings.
So once you’ve approved and published the comments, why not respond to them yourself? This is a good way to keep the conversation going (especially if they reply back) and this continuous repartee will encourage the internet spiders to return because they consider it to be new material. I once had a very nice conversation with a young blogger about a particular subject, an activity I very much enjoyed.
Should you approve comments that disagree with your post? Yes, everyone is entitled to have their say, and as long as the comment is not derogatory to you or your blog, then go ahead and publish it. If you want to set the matter straight, a polite answer is a good idea, as long as you don’t continue the slagging match!
And responding to other people’s blogs will also raise your expert status within your subject (particularly if you respond to like-minded blogs to yours), as well as providing a link back to your blog if your comment is approved.
Why you should activate Akismet
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The beauty of WordPress.com is that most of the technical stuff is already done for you. This is an absolute dream, as this means you can set up a blog in next to no time, and have everything working perfectly for you from the beginning without you having to worry about activating anything.
One of the most beneficial things WordPress does for its .com customers is to automatically set up Akismet as standard, without you having to pay for it. It used to be free for all WordPress users, but now WordPress.org blogs need to pay for an Akismet key to activate it. So what is Akismet?
I like to think of Akismet as a spam-eater. The internet is plagued with spam, and many clever people are continuously employed trying to combat it. Spam is almost like an ever-evolving animal, so it is a never-ending battle trying to keep on top of it, and sometimes it can actually take over your blog and your life.
Let me show you part of my Dashboard from this morning:
As this is a WordPress.org blog, I have already activated the Akismet plugin WordPress kindly supplied me when I downloaded it. Here you can see it has ‘eaten’ 159 spam since yesterday, not to mention all the spam I’ve ever received since setting up this blog. Without Akismet this spam would have appeared as comments, and would have clogged up my email inbox as well. Considering that some of this will not be particularly salubrious, I am glad Akismet has done its work.
And of course, it’s easy to get rid of spam, just click on the word ‘spam’ to view the list:
Don’t bother reading them. Akismet will have checked them for relevant content and if any of them are true comments, they would have been placed in the Comments section ready for your approval, and hopefully your reply.
Some spam will appear to be complimentary – this is to get you to approve them. Whenever you do approve a comment, it’s always wise to check the weblink it is associated with to make sure it hasn’t slipped through Akismet’s net, or you will be giving SEO credit to a website you would not like to recommend.
I had a friend who didn’t activate his Akismet on his blog, and started receiving 1,000 comments a day. Of course they were all spam, which he didn’t realise, and he approved the ‘nice’ ones thinking he was collecting a good following. What he was doing was sending a message to these spammers to send him more, which of course he got in spades. After I had shown him what a true comment was like, with the differences to a complimentary spam, he was at first devastated, and then resolute to activate his Akismet as soon as he could.
The image above shows a red ring about the button ‘Empty Spam’, which I suggest you use regularly! Not only will this give a short-lived sense of annihilation, it may trigger a message to spammers that they are not tolerated, and there are devices at hand to destroy them.