Commenting is one of the best way to make your website more interactive and social. It has got the power to build readership of your blogs and in the same time, increases the reputation and traffic of your blog. But with pros come cons as they are two faces of the same coin. In this article we shall discuss about these two faces of commenting.
Allow or Dis-allow Blog Comments
If you have visited many other blogs, you can see the number of comments they have on each article and it gives you a feeling that the article is read by many and hence it is trustworthy. And yes, it is completely true in almost 98% of the cases. Let’s talk about the rest 2% later on. First lets take a quick overview on the advantages of allowing comments on your blog, then we shall discuss the disadvantages.
Advantages of Allowing Comments on Blog
- Interactivity between the readers, authors and various experts in the field
- Extreme socializing power
- Building of Readership
- Readers spend more time on your blog
- People trust your blog
- The more comments you get on an article, the more people trust it
That’s enough about the advantages for now. Let’s get to the other part.
Disadvantages of Allowing Comments on Blog
Have you ever read an article about how to increase blog traffic? No? Then here is a piece of what most of those articles say, ‘Comment’..! Yikes…! Yea that’s right. Although commenting is good but there lots and lots of spammers out there who comment on your blog just for the sake of a backlink to their blog. And this tends to decrease the quality of comments which in-turn reflects in the decreased readership.
With commenting comes another time consuming work. Moderation. Comment moderation is the process of reading all the comments and deleting which are spammy or which you do not want your readers to read. This might not be a big task for blogs with low traffic but once you get the high traffic margin, it becomes a big headache and requires a lot of time investment.
Critics, or to be clear, negative critics. People have the right to speak up and if they speak something negative about your article and other readers read this negative comment, then you’ll see a declination of readership and it hurts your reputation. Not only that, people might use vulgar words or some words which many don’t feel comfortable to read. This will also cause bad impression on your blog and depending on the words, you searching engine ranking might also come down.
Conclusion
It is not just a simple allow or don’t allow scenario here. It all depends on how you weigh the pros and cons for yourself and decide accordingly. If you ask me then my answer would be to allow but I myself have disabled comment system on this blog because of moderation issues. I’m maintaining this blog as well as my academics which gives me a very tight schedule and hence I’ve got no time to check comments nor reply to them. We might just activate it in the future when time permits.
