Blogs can be killed off by one inappropriate comment or a thousand. Death by one cut or a thousand is still death. Many blog owners are killing off their blogs by simply making it too hard for legitimate blog commenter’s to actually leave a decent comment.
Every blog owner is more than aware of the spam that still manages occasionally to sneak through that wonderful little plugin called Akismet. That is why it is important to always have your comment section of your blog set to all comments being moderated. Yes, it is a bit more work but it is worth the effort.
It is so frustrating for a person who has read your blog and found it interesting and wants to make a comment to what you have written only to find they have to jump through a heap of hoops to do so. Sometimes these comments can add such great additional information or updates to your article that to deny them easy access to say their bit or to add the more recent information is stifling.
The whole point of blogging (in accordance with Google’s wishes) is that these social media sites get conversations going. How can any conversation even start if the blog owner is too lazy or too busy to listen to what their readers are trying to say?
If you don’t want any link juice to leak away from your blog and have made your blog a ‘no-follow’, there’s still no problem if you let your readers have their say. Many people read blogs and want to contribute or comment without having to have a link back to their blog and leech link juice away from your blog.
The ‘no follow’ tag stops that from happening, but you are killing off your own blog if you discourage your readers from commenting. It sort of reminds me that I’m being spoken down to rather than being encouraged to think for myself.
The other blog-killer are those blogs that have been set to send all their comments to Twitter, Facebook, Spurl and sometimes others, that want you to login to your social media site and allow these blogs that you want to add a comment to, to integrate with your social media pages.
While this may be good for the blog owner of the blog receiving the comment, I have serious doubts about letting all and sundry have access to my social media sites. Somehow, red flags are raising my hackles over this because it seems to me that it could quickly lead to a “non-forced” entry cyber attack. If I really like your article then I will add it to my own social media sites by choice.
If you want to grow your blog organically, you will need to stop killing your readers desire to talk with you and allow comments to be easily made to your articles so your blog will thrive.