PRO Media Blog

How often do you watch the comments left on your blogs & posts? If you are a cautious blogger, you should be watching the comments on your posts frequently. Not all comments are meant to be kept. Cleaning them up once a week is a good practice, especially if you have just started to build your rank site & blog’s rank with the Search Engines.

If you search Google about the best practices of leaving comments, a great many will show up. I will analyze the other side of the coin. This analysis will help you understand & either keep favorable ones or eliminate the harmful ones.

When I say "harmful" I do not mean it from a social point of view. When I say "harmful comment" I mean that the comment could lower your page’s authority with search engines. Yes, comments could help build your credibility with Search Engines or ruin it.

Assuming that you are a serious blogger wishing to make it big. Your blog should align to your identity - every part of it. Your content should align to your brand very consistently. This helps build your authority not only with your readers but also in the watchful eyes of search engines.

Comments could give the search bots a false perception on your content. Spam comments, specially, will be so diverse, from the cheap Viagra offers to solving the obesity problem with a single pill, that they tend to dilute the strength of your post’s content. In the eyes of a search engine, now your post is partially good (from what you posted) & partially irrelevant (from all the comments from spammers).

Unless you clean your comments up, you will stack moderately (or even low) with the search engines.

Another point to note is the size of your post compared to the total size of your comments. I find so many blogs with less than 200 words but having over 50 comments, majority of them spams. The comments clearly out-weight the actual content of the post. The worst part of these are the pingbacks - that actually link back to your post. Allowing pingbacks / trackbacks from unrelated sources could prove fatal in the long run.

Search engines also looks into your blog & web site’s association with the "black listed" ones. That’s a troubled zone that you should avoid. Allowing comments, that link you to any of these "bad" zones, and keeping these comments alive could seriously hurt your search engine ranking.

You need to clean up your comments & rid your posts of all such "bad" pingbacks, trackbacks & links. The search engine bots often maintain a crawling schedule. If you log into Google’s webmaster area, it will give you an indication of the next time the Google bot will crawl your sites. As long as you clean up your comments, trackbacks & pibgbacks before the crawl, it is all good.

Note that most search bots will often not follow (no-follow) links or URLs that are left in the comments. The comments will only collude your content in the eyes of the search engine. Search bots do trail the pingbacks & trackbacks, so eliminating the "bad" ones will keep your site clean of any associations with the "black listed" domains.

Find more Blogging & Internet Money Making Tips posts in: Blogging, Blogging Tips, Optimization, Search Engines, SEO

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