Every once in a while people ask whether a blog should have comments or not. There are obvious pros and cons, but two main concerns is that a) people don’t want to deal with spam, and b) they’re worried about the Zero Comments desolate graveyard. In my opinion, comments are a great way to encourage reader interaction and feedback, even if it’s sporadic. Below are a few reasons why enabling comments is beneficial for your blog and website.

  1. Comments encourage a dialogue. The whole point of having a blog is to share information, experiences, and content in general with the public. A blog is like a newspaper or magazine editorial, and you always see people write in with their feedback about how they felt about the piece and their overall opinion. Why do publications bother posting feedback like this? Couldn’t they just publish their content and not have to deal with the hassle of sorting through reader mail and picking a few to showcase? They could, but they want to encourage a dialogue. Successful products and services are the ones that are able to create a dynamic with the user in an emotional, necessary way. If you publish a piece that strikes a chord with your reader, showcasing his feedback demonstrates to both him and the rest of your audience that you care about your users and encourage discussion. Magazines and newspapers have known this for decades. The only difference with blogging is that the feedback is more instantaneous and you don’t often get to pick and choose which comments to showcase.
  2. They validate a piece and provide quality control. If you write something really great, people will generally respond positively. Controversial? You’ll attract opposing viewpoints and spark a debate. Poorly written? Readers will offer feedback on what’s wrong with the piece for future improvement (or future hires if your current writer keeps striking out). Comments are the best way to maintain quality control on your blog and ensure that you’re putting out the best content you can come up with.
  3. They can pull in search traffic. When you compile comments on your blog, you’re having users create additional content for you. This content can pull in long tail search traffic and bring additional readers to your site.
  4. They help brainstorm future blog posts. Blog comments often open doors to new blog posts. Someone might comment with a question or problem that’s arisen from a separate post, paving the way for a follow up entry.

What about some concerns to having comments?

“People are going to spam!”
Well, yes, they probably are, but once you build up an active blog and enact measurements to thwart spam, you won’t receive as many spammy comments than if you have an infrequently updated blog with no moderation whatsoever. You can implement things like plugins (WordPress has a ton), putting first-time users in the penalty box until you can approve their comment, or approving every comment before it’s published (which can be time-consuming, especially for a popular blog).

Also make sure comment links are nofollowed to deter most folks from making the attempt. I’ve been a blog moderator for a few different popular blogs over the past few years, and I never ran into chronic bombardments of spam comments. Sure, there’s always the occasional jerkface who spams like there’s no tomorrow, but you can ban IPs and do some cleanup/deleting, and before you know it everything’s as good as new.

The bottom line is that you won’t be able to stop every spam comment that comes your way, but if you want to blog (and run a successful one at that), battling spam just comes with the territory. Better to clean it up as soon as you come across it — your readers won’t stick around for very long if they see that every comment showcased is nothing but spam. It’ll damage your blog’s trustworthiness factor.

“I don’t want to deal with trolls!”
Ah, trolls. The Internet is full of them, and although most of your users are probably loyal readers and enthusiastic members of your fan club, not everyone is going to love you. In my opinion, if you’ve made the decision to post your content publicly on the Internet, you have to take your lumps as well as the praise it will attract. If you’re cripplingly sensitive to criticism, you probably shouldn’t be blogging because even if you turn off comments, that won’t stop someone from posting his own blog entry about you and criticizing your work via it or a site like Facebook or Twitter. You could delete negative comments, but you run the risk of seeming like a heavy-handed editor who doesn’t like it when people disagree with you.

My suggestion is to remove comments that are inappropriate for your audience (e.g., offensive, lewd, racist) and approach legitimately negative comments (e.g., “This post isn’t well written at all,” “I completely disagree”) as the situation sees fit, either by ignoring them, responding to them politely, countering respectfully but firmly, etc. If you kill a troll with kindness, you’ll make him look like the ass instead of seeming like one yourself (“Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about” vs “Thanks for your input! I disagree with you and stand by what I wrote, but I appreciate you weighing in”).

“What if nobody comments?”
Not every post is going to instantly win a seat at the popular kids table. Some posts will incite more of a reaction than others, and that’s fine. You’ll also probably run into a lot of “0 comments” posts if you’re just starting a new blog, but give it time to build an audience and eventually some comments will trickle in. Even if you go a long stretch with nobody commenting, leaving the option open for people to comment is ideal because you never know when someone will come across one of your posts and want to post a response. If you don’t even allow that as an option, you might alienate that person and deter him from returning.

Thus, in the age-old question of “Comments or No Comments?”, I’m firmly in the “Comments!” category. What do you think? Are there any other benefits to enabling comments on your blog that I’ve left out? Also, if you run a blog and don’t allow comments, what is your reason for not allowing them and how has that worked out for you?