Is it important to allow comments on your blog posts?
 

Does it add value in your opinion to allow comments on a blog post?

For me personally, there's more negative than positive in allowing blog comments.

same. It seems like more spam than actual constructive replies. :2 cents:

Same. Easily over 500 spam messages for every legitimate comment.

Jesus why would you?

For a while, when my blog was popular, I did...my two censorship rules were 1) no personal stuff about the models (why do people feel the need to out real names?) and 2) anything super hateful...and, of course, I wouldn't post when I got death threats.

I wasn't sure if it was good for SEO stuff. That's the only thing I was curious about.

Do more comments make it more popular and therefore more important in search engines?

I was hoping they don't make a difference. Thanks, guys. :thumbsup

Yes, but moderate it and have a good bot prevention system in place. If over time all the real person comments are low level short trivial remarks, then it may make sense to do away with it.

I never do. It’s a shit show waiting to happen

Allow comments, but don't allow anyone else to comment.

Think about it :thumbsup

a very interesting question I was asking myself for a while. Theoretically, if you have a well-tweaked SEO page, then the unplanned text will ruin the optimization score.

But, pages with comments (manually approved and cleaned from spam by Akismet) seem more alive and I believe people visiting it will see a page as a more active and reliable source and will act differently.

I am having very satisfactory sales on one of my cam blogs where comments are allowed.

I agree. Moderation is important though.

Allow comments, but require registration...

Have a credit card iframe on the registration page.

Hey guys,

In the past there were lots of comments on my blogs but lately no where near as many, like 1/10th as many comments.

Dave

This right here. A site that appears alive in more ways than one may develop a pretty good following.

Blogging now for close to twenty years, and I leave the comments on. IMO real-human responsive comments are free fodder for long tail searches and are of reasonable quality, plus, if anybody reads them it increases my time-spent-on-page score. I use a plugin to filter out all the bots, and then comments with links or comments from first-time commenters land in my moderation queue. It used to take some time to moderate the real comments, but they have gotten a lot more rare so it's no burden. Are they important? Not any more. But they're essentially no extra effort once you're set up.

Oh, yeah, and I moderate like a son-of-a-bitch. If the comment isn't friendly, nice, complimentary, or otherwise fails to make me happy, it goes boom. I'm not running a freeze peach forum. I'm definitely not running a place for bitter incels to make nasty remarks about the talent whose pictures are (in theory) making me money.

as already mentioned above, spam comments, all viagra and hard on pills, 100´s a day, i don´t allow comments any more :2 cents:

You absolutely should allow comments with hard moderation. Using captchas with spam filtering and manual moderation.
Lots of people have lots to say. It can be great for your website providing you can be bothered to keep on top of it - not for the lazy.