Artists: Are you encouraging comments on your blog?

This is an issue that requires something of a balancing act. A high number of comments posted on blogs are simply spam. “Splogging” has become a way of getting higher Google rankings for very undesirable sites by placing junk messages on blogs with unrestricted comment settings. Unless a blogger is diligently monitoring comments (and that means watching all the old blog postings that are long-forgotten) it might be wise to utilize some of comment restriction options blog software provides. It’s interesting to note that only 30% of the millions of blog postings added every day are in English. I too often lose sight of the fact that the US is just a small portion of the Internet universe.

This month the traffic on my blog has alsmot doubled (from 6000 unique visitors to over 10,000 so far). The first few days of the month I could track it to links to my blog and the increase was probably a true increase in readership. But the past 2 weeks I’ve run into problem – serious spam. I’ve always gotten a few a day but in the past 15 days akismet has stopped over 1000 spam comments. Another 20-30 have slipped by but were caught by other anti-spam mechanisms in wordpress. Only 2 real spam comments made it through and were posted (and so had to be deleted). Sadly those on blogger and typepad don’t have such protection and as Pat said something has to be done to stop the spam because with numbers like I’m getting there is no way to manually keep up.

My concern was that no one would comment at all!!!! I’ll give it try and see what happens (my theme for this year). Thank you for the great information Lisa, Pat, and Alyson. I’ve learned so much in just this last month from you all.

I think there is maybe a misunderstanding here. In reality, what you need to do to comment on a moderated Blogger blog which only accepts registered member comments (ie you need to register – you don’t need to have a Blogger blog) is very little different than for other blogging software. You say who you are, what your e-mail is and basically identify yourself through a process of registration. I have to go through the same process all the time when commenting on the blogs of other people who don’t use Blogger. Blogger offers a great deal of protection * no comment on a Blogger blog actually counts in any way for browser ranking purposes. I forget what the term is but I think it means all links are automatically coded ‘no follow’ or some such – which basically means any links posted don’t count. * if you limit them to people registered with Blogger and use the letter recognition thing as well it stops virtually all spam from getting through * finally, if you moderate your comments that stops the rest. My blog gets lots of comments on old posts and I wouldn’t dream of turning off my moderation for that reason. Plus I get to send any spamming comments to Google spam just for good measure! Having said all that, if people think they need a Blogger blog to comment then that is obviously of concern – which is why I tend to respond like this every time I see this point being raised.

I love the letter recognition option! I always wondered what point it had until I started my Blog. Instantly I realized expecting individuals to go through the tedious task will save me a lot of comment space in the long run. Now I’m just working on getting my name out there to generate an interest in my Blog. The curse of there being so many to choose from makes the challenge of getting yours to stick out all the more difficult. Not that I’m not up for the task, of course.