Should You Keep Your Comments Turned On?

If you own a blog, you probably know how important it is to build a community behind it. One way to that is by encouraging your users to comment on your posts. Comments not only allow you to keep your users engaged, they can provide you with invaluable information on how to improve the overall quality of your blog.

You may have seen that many prominent bloggers keep their comment sections closed. So why am I talking about how good comments are when successful bloggers close their comments to public? One thing that I can tell you is it’s not due to those bloggers hating comments. There are always circustances that make you undertake drastic measures (and closing comments is one for sure). But here is how you can determine whether having your comments section turned on is right for your blog:

• Not all comments are good comments: we all wish we lived in a world where you could blog about your favorite topic and no one was around to spam your blog. That world doesn’t exist today. With all the automated spamming tools out there, you simply can’t escape the spamming issue. You can avoid it by having your spam filters on, but even the best spam filters are not foolproof. So if you are not planning to keep up with your blog comments on an everyday basis, you should probably consider hiring a person to do so. But if you can’t afford someone, then you should either moderate all comments or turn them off for good.
• Not all comments are complementary: it’s good to be complemented for your work, isn’t it? But for every satisfied reader, there are a couple of dissatisfied ones out there. And you can be sure that dissatisfied readers/customers not always communicate in the most polite tone. Be prepared for tough criticism in your comment section. If you decide to turn your comments on for your blog, you need to face the criticism and address the issues. Once the criticism is out there on your blog, your best readers will also see them, so it is important for you to devise the right action plan to address the criticism brought against you.
• Not all negative comments are tolerated: if you are working for a big corporation with a lot at stake, you can’t afford to let people write negative comments on the corporate blog that could hurt your brand. A company such as American Express can’t afford to deal with extremely negative comments that not only hurt its brand but can also potentially hurt its profits. The whole blogging thing is not big enough for American Express to justify getting nasty criticism from customers (justified or unjustified). So make sure you understand the boundaries before opening up your company’s blog to comments.
• Not all comments are White Hat: I don’t know about you but I have had a run in with hackers a bunch of times on my blogs. If you have a blog that is even slightly successful, you can be sure that there are wolves out there who want to take advantage of your success. One new technique that these guys are using these days is “affiliate stuffing.” What they do is they inject a piece of invisible code to your blog through the comment section. Once your visitors check out the infected blog post, their computers are cookied with affiliate marketing code from companies such as Amazon or eBay. Once they visit those sites in the future and make a purchase, the hackers will get a commission from the merchants. But this practice is illegal and can bring liability to you and your business. Make sure you have the technical knowledge necessary to deal with these issues.

As you can see, having your comment section open is not the right decision all the time. I suggest you do your best to keep your comment section open, but sometimes it is just impossible to do so. In that scenario, make sure you communicate with your readers the reasons behind your decision to close comments for a post or your entire blog.