Do Your Comments Suck?

On a recent guest post, I got this comment:

Please do not call dial-up “normal”. We are in a time where broadband is more normal thing.

So what and where is the problem?

Well, the post was not about internet connections; it was about small and useful software. And the line that the comment referred to was “these (big) softwares may take hours to download on a normal dial up connection!”

As you can see, the comment is not related to the content and does not add anything new!

Now, sit in a good yoga position (optional), take a long breath and ask yourself:

Do I leave comments like this?

Remember the two golden rules when writing comments:

1. Be Relevant. Do not stray from the post topic. Leave only related comments!
2. Add Something. No blog post can sum up everything. With just a couple of minutes of thought, you can easily come up with something that has been left out. Just add it.

How Bad Comments Can Hurt You

Bad comments can cost you.

1. Traffic. When people read a quality comment, they visit the commenter's blog or website. The opposite is also true. If you leave weak comments, people will just ignore them.
2. Brand. All of us promote our own brand when we comment, be it personal or professional. Leaving bad comments hurts your brand image.
3. Other Blog Comments: If some blog owner marks your comments as spam, sooner as later, other blogs will also start blocking your comment. This will result in a lot of wasted time!

Here are two great examples of good comments:

timethief on Why I Am Not Getting PageRank?:

Without doubt Google has made it clear that they are looking for natural linking patterns. Another thing that has become clear as well is the Google sandbox phenomena. The Google sandbox debate arises when Google does not assign PageRank to a new website until after six (6) months. This is presumably to serve the purpose of giving new websites time to develop or disappear altogether. The sandbox has become a normal everyday reality for ranking on Google, and most SEO’s now accept that. The result is that to rank on Google for any kind of competitive keyword, you need to be able to leverage some degree of “trust”. What expedites PageRank is building trust via the methods you have shared in your post.

In fact, as Michael Gray astutely put it – “The sandbox isn’t something you are trying to get out of, it’s the trustbox that you are trying to figure a way into.” — From an educational post for those seeking to determine if their blogs have been Google “sandboxed”.

I’d like to share some additional tips. Make it part of your blog strategy to focus your attention on the following:
* publishing high quality unique content frequently;
* creating clean code and ensuring your site validates;
* tagging properly so the content can be found and indexed;
* linking to exceptional content on authoritative sites with PageRank;
* being careful not to link too link to frequently to sites with lower PageRank.

That’s almost a Guest Post! It added a lot of value and points I did not include in the post.

Lauren on Blog Contest Fraud:

Ha ha! Good for you for being real and standing up for honesty in the "blogosphere."

Thank you, it is these tactics that really need to be brought to light. How pathetic, I mean, we all want traffic, but if you have to resort to posting generic comments just to get your link out there, your site/content must really suck.

But then again, we are talking about "spammers" here, which by definition are frauds whose content is bogus.

And in the scheme of things, such elaborate blogging scams like the contest you experienced, can only be likened to scams on the street perpetrated by low-life's and thugs. It's criminal; they do not fit in with the rest of the blogging society and make up the web's seedy underbelly.

I have been spending quite a bit of time on your blog, really enjoying your articles. You are really a talented blogger, the honesty and integrity alone is beneficial to bloggers and the blogosphere in general. And I'm pretty conceited, I think I am a pretty good blogger myself, I don't hand out compliments everyday.

Keep on doing what you do, glad I stumbled onto your blog, will definitely be a return visitor.
Have a great day. ~Lauren

This comment has quality, and most importantly, it left the writer (SBA) almost speechless!

For more about improving your comments, you can download Commenting Guide For Bloggers. To get it, sign up for our newsletter.