What are the pros and cons of having comments posted on your blog?

[lindsayjhopkins]

I get a lot of spammy comment comments to my blog which I trash, but I'm also particular about the comments I allow.

How do the search engines regard these comments, should I allow more to be posted as it looks like I'm getting more traffic.And by posting these comments, who benefits from the backlinks?

[RankSurge]

It all depends on what you want to achieve with the blog. I run 2 sites that get lots of comments. For one site, the comments become part of the content of the site (it essentially sets a scenario for people to debate over) so for that example, it adds to the uniqueness f the site.

For another site that I run, I have to spend a lot of time monitoring the comments since many people are there to just drop a link. Like everything on the web, you need to decide what's going to make your site stand out from the rest.

Allowing "junk" comments won't add any value.

[EGOL]

I think that it is important to be a critical judge.  Are those comments relevant to your topic?  That is the first test.

Then, where to do those links go?  If they are not going to high quality relevant pages then the people who are placing them are using your website (and your visitors) to promote their own interests.

If your website has links going out to trashy sites it will not be good for your image in the eyes of your visitors but the search engines can detect that and lower your rankings.

I have tried allowing comments but the amount of spam and the amount of junk links were too high.  So, I turned comments off. I lost good interaction but I don't have time to do that work and paying someone to do it would not produce a positive return.... and I don't want to depend upon volunteers.

If your site has a small amount of traffic then keeping the comments clean and relevant might not be too hard.  But once your traffic gets high it can be an overwhelming task.

WordPress (and other content systems) have filters that you can install.  They will block the worst of the comment spam.

Finally, a lot of these comments are not placed by humans.  They are placed by robots that crawl the web, find open comment forms and deposit a comment with links.  So when you see comments like... "Great information, nice" (link)... that is probably a robot.