Your Take On Visitor Comments?
Last Update: December 30, 2010

Hey all I have a simple question that could have a huge impact on my web page so I must ask. I have recently started receiving visitors to my new site and they are beginning to post comments on my blog. I am curious though because I believe a few of them have found my site via a link here at WA. The reason I think this is because I noticed that the same user posted on multiple posts, but left different website information each time. Both of the sites are not related to my web page directly but I feel he is using my page to harvest backlinks. I would not have questioned this if the sites he was linking to were relevant to my topic, but my site is very specific about a single topic and these links have no connection to my content.  I guess my question is should I allow posts containing links to other web pages or will this hurt my page rank eventually. I really don't mind if my site is used for backlinking unless it effects my PR. If this will effect my rank then is there a way to ensure people are not posting links in my comments section, or do I need to personally weed out these comments manually. Thanks to anyone who could help.

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kpfingaz Premium
Only approve comments if they're relevant to the topic of the post or page regardless of where their site is linking to. Comment links do not harm your PR as much because of the nofollow tag.

Stuff like "Nice post." or "I love your blog" aren't relevant to anything and is probably being used to get a backlink in which case you do not want to encourage these types of comments.
Alex Copeland Premium
Like you say nothing wrong with making the site look a little busy with a couple of these types of comments but as it gets more popular you will find a lot of similar ones popping up. The reason is it doesn't actually reference anything on the site too specifically so they can use automated software or just cut and paste into a lot of different sites for very minimal effort. Keep up the good work with the site though, like it.
phildeeze Premium
Thank you for your input I really appreciate it. Unfortunately you described their post nearly word for word and like I said they linked to irrelevant pages but if it wont hurt me I don't mind a few here and there I just don't want to become full of irrelevant comments. Thanks again
Alex Copeland Premium
I believe if the person has taken the time to add a relevant and thoughtful comment, not just a 'I love your blog and will be coming back again; type spam, then they deserve to keep the link. As far as pagerank etc goes don't worry about that as all Wordpress links from things such as comments and user name urls are 'nofollow' by default which means you won't lose any of your pagerank at all. Hope that helps!
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