The way websites have worked has changed over the last several years: its been quite radical. Back in the day, guest posting, link building through bios, 
and other SEO pushes were considered the best way to improve ranking. However, websites such as one of my originals (AskWillOnline.com) are null-undated with requests from past guest bloggers requesting for all links to their guest posts to be removed.
One area that has been questionable is with comments. Are comments good for SEO? How should you interact with comments and, most importantly and above all else, should you enable comments? Here are the main pros and cons to enabling comments.
Enabling Comments – The Pros
- Sparks the community talking – The main benefit to enabling comments is that it enables your articles and posts to create a community. If you disable comments, it is you talking to your audience, without the possibility of your audience talking back to you. Generally, for blogging, it is seen as more healthy that if the audience have the opportunity to talk bloggers, they are able to through commenting.
- Sparks great conversations – As good as you might think your articles are, you will never be able to talk about every part of a topic of conversation. This is where commenting comes into their own, in the sense that it lets others add to the content of an article. For example, you could be reviewing something, and others comment on their personal opinions of what you are reviewing. Not only does it spark more conversation, it actually improves the readability of your content too.
Enabling Comments – The Cons
- Spam – A major problem with enabling comments is the spam that comes with them. If you have your website run using platforms such as WordPress, then there will be plugins that will help you block out the spam comments. However, even with this, many spam comments can slip through, which becomes a timely process removing them manually.
- Negative comments – Allowing anyone to comment means you have to take the good with the bad. This allows ‘trolls’ to send abuse through comments, which can be quite demoralising if they are criticising you or your work.
However, in this situation, try to take negative comments with a pinch of salt. You can take negative comments badly, or you can look at them as legitimate criticism, just coming across badly. Generally, these comments have some really good feedback embedded into them, that has the potential to significantly improve your content and website, so do not knock them, but take them on board!
