Tel: 0113 2170419
www.littlefishwebdesign.com
Why I turned blog comments off
Thursday, October 05, 2006
I was recently asked why I people couldn't leave comments on my blog posts, and why if they wanted to get in touch, they had to use my contact form.
The reason for this is that there are plenty of unscrupulous programs out there that people use to 'comment spam'. This means that they fill in a few details and a link to their own site or blog, choose a keyword and press 'go'. The program then goes and finds all blogs that it can with that keyword and leaves a comment.
It sounds nice in theory but has several drawbacks:
1) It can leave comments on completely unrelated sites - if you had a blog about a serious medical condition but mentioned web design in one single post, would you really want several hundred comments saying "hey nice site about web design. check out my site etc..", no? I didn't think so.
2) A lot of people can't even use the software properly so you get comments left that make even less sense.
3) I DO NOT WANT Viagra, Cialis or any other medication, anatomy-extending device or anything else you could possibly spam me about, thank you.
And most importantly:
4) Most blog programs now automatically insert the rel=nofollow tag into any links in comments. This means the links have absolutely no value in the search engine's eyes - they will not index or follow the link and therefore you have not gained a backlink. The only way this link is useful is if someone follows it and visits your site. My guess is that 99% of link spam doesn't get followed.
To summarise - if you would like to comment on anything in my blog, please get in touch via the contact form. Whilst this doesn't allow comments to be viewed publically, it does mean that I control the quality of the blog.
