Getting the Most out of Comments
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So you’ve got a blog or website that allows users to post reviews or comments for your posts or products, good for you. Engaging your site visitors is critical in creating increased visitor loyalty and trust. The additional content is also great for better SEO.
Taming the Spam Beast
As anyone who has ever had to deal with comments or reviews knows, dealing with spam can be a full time job. So much so that programs have become popular that allow you to either log in with another ID, like facebook, twitter or linkedIN accounts, or use a third party service that manages commenting across multiple sites like disqus or js-kit.
The advantage of both of these methods is they validate the site visitor and help reduce spam.
Pros and Cons of External Logins and Community Platforms
Pros
- Easy for site visitors to logon
- Reduced spamming with some
- Sometimes visitors are already logged in making it easy to post
Cons
- You may loose control of your visitor database
- If the service goes down, see Twitters uptime reports, you may loose the ability for visitors to log in
- Javascript based systems like disqus and JS-kit cannot be easily scanned by Google so you may get no SEO benefit
- Facebooks comments box has a similar problem as it is loaded in an iFrame, and cannot be crawled (without some programing tricks)
This last con is a significant enough problem for the javascript based programs to not use them on a heavily community based site. As of this writing we are using disqus on nickvalente.com.
Best Bet for Comments
What will work best of you depends on what you’re trying to get from the comments on your site. Using the out of the box comment system in WordPress ,Blogger or your CMS should work fine for most folks who have a thriving monitored community. If however you have low traffic or don’t actively participate in your sites community, consider one of these solutions.
What do you think?
Related articles
- Disqus now enables tagging in comments (techattitude.com)
- Make Facebook Comments Box Indexable by Search Engines (seomoz.org)
