A recent thread on an internet forum, Webmaster Peers, got me thinking: ‘what would happen if I disabled comments on my blog?’. Well, lately, as some of you may have realised, my comments section broke, so I was “lucky” enough to actually find out the impact it had on my blog, albeit short term. This article will basically discuss this, and the impact it had on my blog.
The importance of comments
Comments are, in my opinion, one of the most important parts of any blog. It gives the reader the chance to interact with the author, as well as being a perfect opportunity to ask any questions and discuss the article. From a blog owner’s point of view, an active comment section can make their blog look more professional as it looks like it has a larger reader base, thus encouraging more people to comment.
So, why disallow comments?
I know what you’re thinking… ‘if comments are so important, why would we even consider not allowing them on our blogs?!’. If you’re sitting at your computer thinking that question, I can fully understand that, but here are a couple of reasons I can think of:
- Inactivity – Whilst an active comment section looks great for your blog, an inactive comment section has a negative impact on your site. For the average reader who’s passing by your site, if you have no comments, it usually means you have no traffic, and having no traffic looks VERY bad. Therefore, if you disable comments, it won’t look as bad.
- If you own a forum – As Alex mentioned in his guest post, some people will add a forum to their blog. If you’re one of those people that has a forum attached, disabling comments will encourage users to go and post on the forum instead.
- Spam – OK, this is only in very extreme cases, but if your blog is getting uncontrollable amounts of spam, you may deem it neccessary to disable comments.
The effect of disabling comments
I’ll admit it, I’m not fully sure about the long term effect as my comments were only down for a few days, but for the following paragraph I’m talking from others’ experiences I’ve found, and also basing it on a normal blog rather than one with a forum attached.
- Short term – The short term effect on my blog was minimal. As you can see if you go on my homepage, my comment average dropped massively since my comment section went down briefly. On the day my comments stopped working, my traffic halved, but it was back to normal the next day. That said, I’m not sure how long it’ll take my comment average to recover fully.
- Long term – Well, you’re bound to lose readers, purely because there will be a few commentators who only visit your blog to leave a comment for the promotion. That said, you’ll no doubt notice that, as less and less spammers visit your blog, the quality of the average reader is higher, thus making your advert spaces a lot more valuable.
What say?!
Have you got comments enabled on your blog? Would you consider disabling them? What are your views on the topic? Please feel free to leave a comment below to have your say. If you liked the post or found it interesting, click the icons below to share it around.
The comments really are important. Disabling them is like disabling your lungs or something. lol.
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Woah! *Lungs* lol, didn’t knew comments are such such important for our blogs, but unfortunately I don’t get so much comments on my blog and yeah it really feels like my blog is not breathing, but I always keep it alive but adding new stuff but I need some comments tooo ’sob’ ’sob’
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Agreed. Comments are one of the most important parts of any blog as they do, as you say, just keep it alive. As Hector mentioned in the comment a few down from this one, if you aren’t going to have comments you might as well just make a static site
Well, before it really used to be that when a blog is new, comment forms have to be turned off first because there really isn’t that much to say… But now it has become different because a lot of bloggers have become so active that even a new blog can get 10+ comments on its first day..
Other blogs who have their comment form closed are the blogs that are just created to increase SERPS… example is when someone creates a landingpage for weight loss product, he’ll likely create a blog as well so that it could bring more traffic to the main site, and the blog doesn’t really need to have interactions…
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Ah yes, I hadn’t thought about that second point if I’m honest. Thanks for adding a great comment
I would agree with you. New blogs really don’t need any comments as its their start. But when you start receiving traffic then comments are so important.
Harish | Blogging Kid’s last blog post..Taking A Break For Few Days, Its Holidays For Me So Stay Tuned
Agreed. Whilst comments do look good on a new blog, the vast majority of these will recieve little to no comments for the first week or two, so it might be worth disabling comments to hide the inactivity.
Comments are the essential thing for a blog. Without it, a blog is just a regular website.
Blogging is, in my opinion, interaction. Similar to forums, but more active and dynamic, blogs are there to encourage discussions and debate ideas.
Why would someone want to turn off comments? It doesn’t make sense to me. Even when they don’t get that much comments (lack of marketing), or get lots of spam (Akismet is turned off), blogs are there for discussion. If you don’t want comments, get a regular site.
Héctor | Blog for Bloggers’s last blog post..SEO And Domain Name Changes, Advisable?
Thanks for leaving such a good comment.
Yeah, I agree with you, I wouldn’t disable comments unless I was forced to, and think that they are a vital part of any blog, but there are some reasons that are listed above for why someone might want to disable comments.
I mean, there was one post I did that received uncontrollable spam. It got about 40 spam comments per day, and, although Askimet caught most of them, it was damn annoying, so I disabled the comments on that post and it’s since got a lot nicer to run the blog
Of course, A blog without comments isn’t a blog! However, in your case, I would have disabled comments as well. By the way, I sometimes received comments from so-called spammer, but the comments didn’t really looks like spam except one of the commentator didn’t seem to have read my post, and just posted something I didn’t understand well. Strangly the two only spam comments I received (including the above one I mentioned) came from Russia! At leasts, both blog were written in a russian-like language. Another thing is that both comments I received as spam didn’t use gravatar.
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Good point about the gravatar. I suppose that if the commentator can’t be bothered to set up a gravatar, they probably aren’t going to make a quality comment.
Yeah, I might try reopening comments for ‘that post’ though, just to see if the spam has stopped.
I’ve seen this, too! Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of spam from, apparently, Russia :s
Héctor | Blogging for Bloggers’s last blog post..SEO And Domain Name Changes, Advisable?
Hmm, that’s interesting. I’m in the habit of identifying spam comments and deleting them without actually paying too much attention to where they came from, but I’ll take a look when I get some more and report back
I don’t think a Blog owner can be happy with having any comments on his blog.. so why close’em ?
I guess comments help you know, what type of visitors you are having, what do they want.. what are they searching for..
Comments also motivate author / blog owner.
I guess, the only one perfect reason to close comments will be when you attach a forum. Otherwise, We can handle spam thanks to akismet and other plugins !
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I totally agree with you Enk. Akismet has eased up our blogging life a lot. Else comment box on websites is the most acclaimed corner of a blog to contaminate easily.
Yeah, good point, but Askimet does have it’s bad points. The main one is that it often finds genuine comments and labels them as spam, so you still have to check through all the spam comments anyway.
Some very good points you’ve raised there, Enk, especially the one about knowing what your reader wants. I suppose you can tell what they want without them saying ‘I (don’t) like it’, because the popular posts will get more comments
I don’ think I could bear to disable comments. Commenting is such a huge part of blogging. However, I get so pissed with spammers sometimes I want to.
Btw, it’s great to be back.
teenwebguru’s last blog post..Taking a Break
I agree. I think I would have disabled comments by now if it wasn’t for the amount of comments I get, as I get the same amount in spam!
Great to have you back, but where’s your gravatar gone?!
Comments is how I connect with my readers even I have a forum on my blog. I can’t even think about not allowing comments.
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Hmm, interesting you should say that.
A friend of a friend used to own a MMO blog that had a forum. He was getting 30-40 comments per post, so he disabled comments and set up a section in the forum to discuss his posts instead. When people went to post their comment, they looked (and posted) in the rest of the forum, so now he runs a successful blog and forum.
(Sorry to the people who I’ve told that story to before
)