Moderating Spam Comments

We all know that the internet is full of spam. It clogs your inbox every day trying to sell you everything from diet pills to things that will enlarge your...whatever!

Well, today I'd like to address the fine art of commenting without being a spammer. First, let me say that I totally understand that you think your own website is the coolest one on the WWW and you're just dying to tell EVERYBODY about it, but there's a right way and a wrong way to go about this.

When leaving a comment on a blog post or forum thread ALWAYS write something relevant to what was written there. If the blogpost is about gardening, then don't say something like "Hey! Great writing! Check out my funny cat videos site!". Most comments are moderated by the admin and something like that isn't likely to be approved.

It always irritates me to see a really good discussion on one of the threads at LR or DP get hijacked by some idiot who simply posts "That's interesting" or when the morons I call the "Jawoco Spambillies" come along and simply post "hmmm". I take great comfort in knowing at least that people who write garbage like that will soon fail online to make way for the rest of us who actually try to be helpful to others.

Look, we all want backlinks to our sites...I understand that, but it doesn't take much effort to at least post something meaningful so that others reading will actually WANT to check out your site. I used to leave this blog here open to anyone who wanted to post and get a free backlink, but I got hit with so much spam lately that I was forced to moderate everything now. I'm a very busy person and it was simply taking too much of my time sifting through all the crap I was getting every day.

One person was even posting the exact same thing that had nothing to do with any of my posts and doing it EVERY day on whatever posts were on the homepage! The irony is that I would have given them a link back to their site by approving the comment IF it looked like they had even read my blog, but none of the comments were about anything I wrote.

The other point is that Google only counts ONE link from a site to yours anyway, so there's absolutely no reason to post more that one comment, if all you want is just the link.

So, the next time you're looking to gain some comment luv be sure to put at least a little bit of thought into it and you'll be sure to get approved! It's not that difficult!!!