Which blog comments annoy you the most?

Blog comments I could do without

Do you have a blog?

Do you wish you had more comments?

Most of us do, but there are some I could do without.

When you write regular blog posts it’s nice to feel that people are reading them, and the most obvious sign they are is the number of comments you get. Most of us would like more blog comments and occasionally I am asked how to achieve this.

Sadly I have no foolproof methods, apart from belonging to a community that reads and comments on each other’s posts. You might like to read this post on the excellent Problogger site back in 2006 that gives 10 techniques to get more comments on your blog.

The post also suggests that 90% of blog readers were ‘lurkers’ – reading without making themselves known – while 9% contributed ‘a little’ and only 1% actively contributed.

That was eight years ago and online life has moved on enormously. I’d say that fewer people are commenting on blogs than even a couple of years ago, and they usually do it for a reason. Perhaps to raise their profile within their industry, or to try and make contact with a famous name who is otherwise difficult to reach.

I find that more interaction happens on social media platforms, especially Twitter, where it’s so quick and easy to respond. That’s why I sometimes write a post about the conversations I’ve had with other home workers on social media.

But you probably get blog comments you don’t want. You know the kind – ‘Great post, keep up the good work’ or ‘I’ve been looking for this information all over the web. I’ll be back.’

You can get plug-ins that prevent bots from spamming you with thousands of comments linked to unsavoury sites. One of A’s blogging clients ended up with 7500 comments on her blog.

But people still pay VAs on sites like Elance to spend hours doing so-called SEO, leaving dodgy comments on any site remotely related to their own. Once one of these VAs, who had obviously been provided with a crib sheet of comments by their client, but misunderstood his instructions, left the whole list as a comment on A’s blog!

I ruthlessly delete anything that appears to be generic, and am amazed when I see sites that don’t. It gives the impression the site owner doesn’t read their blog comments, which isn’t a good incentive for genuine readers to contribute.

More annoying are the comments that appear to be generously pointing out a problem – ‘There is an issue along with your site in web explorer, could check this?’ I took this seriously at first, as occasionally readers do take the trouble to draw my attention to things that aren’t working, and I’m very grateful to them. But you learn to spot the fakes.

If I’m uncertain whether the comment is genuine I check the website link the commenter has provided. If it’s the kind of thing I don’t want to be linked to – often scammy ‘make money at home’ sites – I delete the comment.

Because spammy blog comments are bad for SEO all my comments now automatically have no follow links so that I’m not inadvertently passing on page rank to dubious sites. But I do give genuine contributors the chance to share their own information through CommentLuv.

Some of the comments are so bad they are hilarious. Take this example, left by the appropriately named Travesti – ‘I am bindle to seek out this clumsily attainable as it contains affluence of data. I consistently like bigger to browse the acclimatized content..’

Sheer brilliance, and ‘bindle’ really ought to be a word. What’s your strategy for dealing with unwanted blog comments?