Pros and Cons to Allowing Comments on Blogs

Every blogger will have this decision to make – to allow comments on their articles or not. It is a tough decision to make too considering that you will find some websites that do not allow comments while others invite users to comment on article. At the end of the day, there is no right or wrong answer to this: it is down to you. However, if you are unsure whether you should allow comments on your blog/website or not, feel free to read the main pros and cons to allowing and disallowing comments on a blog. Here is part one of this article – the pros and cons to allowing comments on blogs.

 

 

When you allow comments on your blog:

• It helps web users engage – This is the main benefit to allowing comments. At the end of the day, a blog is not just you communicating to people. It is a conversion between you and your audience! Therefore, to enable your audience to talk to you, you can do so through allowing comments.
• Increases pageviews – If you are lucky enough, some commentators will enable email notifications every time a new comment is added to a certain article on your website. In these situations, the pageviews for that article will go through the roof as the ‘commenters’ comment and converse with each other.
• Helps produce ideas – I have found that some of my article ideas actually come from people’s comments. For example, on AskWillOnline.com, I had a poem analysis and one of my commenters asked if I did an analysis of a certain poem. At the time, I did not so for my next article, I did exactly that! As well as gaining good traffic from the article, it also increased the relationship I had with my audience since they knew I actually listened to them and responded to their comments unlike many other websites.

However, when you allow comments on your blog:

• You will read the bad comments – You might think you won’t. However, when you stumble across a bad comment that criticises something about my blog, article or myself, I have to find another comment that counteracts the negativity with positivity, such as a comment which thanks me for such an amazing website etc. After a while, it becomes quite a daily routine to look at comments to see the bad and good comments.
• Spam – Unfortunately, there are many people out there that go onto articles to leave comments with links to their own websites in a desperate effort that this will increase their SEO or traffic. Spam comments need to be moderated so make sure you have access to approve/decline comments before they are published online.
• ‘Trolls’ – Some negative comments come from people called trolls that are simply commenting because they are either jealous or bored and want a reaction. In these situations, just ignore them. If people did not like your blog, they would not spend their time reading your articles and leaving comments at the end of them!