SEO Step By Step Guide– 160. How to Stop Blog Commenting Menace?

All of us run our blogs in an effort to make the process of posting fresh content to our website easy. This seems to make things easy for the spammers too. How does it help the spammers. People who want to increase their number of back links, indiscriminately post comments in blogs. No one would want to our blogs to be cluttered with spam comments that do not offer any value to our blogs but turning our blog to a link generating machine for the spammers.

One of the things that you can do is to set the commenting options off. But this would block genuine comments too unnecessarily. We should have our blogs open to the internet community or at least to those who are interested in engaging in worthwhile discussion or those who want to share their genuine opinions. You can set the option only to blog members. Those who want to comment in your blog will then be forced to sign up. This will discourage at least 50% of the spammers because spammers are lazy people and that is why they remain as spammers.

Another measure that you can take against blog commenting menace is to allow blogs only after your approval. Blog comments should not be allowed to be posted in your blog directly. This will give you control on what kind of comments will appear in your blog. You can keep out the spam posts off your blog and your blog will get the advantage of genuine comments and at the same time it will be a clean place.

To avoid search engines following links in the blog comments, you can make use of ‘nofollow’ tag. Google introduced this tag in 2005 and not until recently this became popular. By making use of the nofollow tag you will defeat the purpose for which the spammers are posting their comments in your blog. Google and other search engines will not take the links with nofollow tag in to consideration while ranking their websites. The link will be an active link and users will be able to go to the linking sites by clicking on the link in the blog comment but for search engines, those links are not significant in any way.

Once spammers notice that your blog is using nofollow tag, they will leave you alone. To take it one step further you can even add a note in your blog saying that you are using nofollow tag. This will discourage a greater percentage of blog spammers from ruining your blog space. It can be highly frustrating for the webmaster that spends a lot of time in posting original content and maintaining the blog with great difficulty to see people that make least efforts reap the benefits. You can be in total control of your blog by following the simple tips above.

SubmitEdge