Disabling Comments

Some three years ago, I defriended about 100 people on facebook simply because they all came to argue on my page and I hate argument. Since then, the only people I friend on fb are the ones I know personally. About two months ago, I did my best to disable comments on Blogger. Couldn't quite get it right but hid it as well as I could. About three days ago, I finally stopped anyone from commenting for my public posts. The only people who can comment are the people I've added - about 5% of the people who have added me.

Why so? It spoils my day/week/month when people say negative things about what I write. 

Does it affect traffic? I doubt it. One of my best performing pieces is currently doing 16,000 to 18,000 hits per day on the web. It has had about 3 comments in three years. On hubpages, my piece on atheism had hundreds of comments. It took 20 months to be noticed by Google and then only had around three hits a day. Another hub on hp gets 50 to 60 hits a day but has never had a single comment (it was there about 14 months before I disabled it to move it here).

So I don't buy that comments affects traffic. By the same token, I don't believe that interacting on the board affects ;traffic. On Hp, less than 2% of my traffic was from other hubbers and on Blogger it's all from search engines. 

So my question is, why is commenting considered important?

Comments definitely affect traffic in several ways:

1. Content to your page is appended by all the comments- in Google's eyes comments are valid content

2. Comments that come in and flood daily get Google's attention so they definitely count- I had a hub with almost 2 million hits and it was triggered by a lot of the comments and the activity on the hub

3. People may send someone to look at a comment and they may read the whole page... (organic traffic), that person may leave a comment and someone else reads it and sends someone to the page- millions of these scenarios

4. comments add contrast to your article so they are also good for your content (if moderated of course)

Although I don't see comments stand alone as a great traffic generator- in  many ways not even  mentioned here, they are important, sometimes vital. My hub never would have taken off in the serps had it not been for the 800 comments it generated practically in 2 years, those comments were where people went to verify my articles "formula" (get rid of a pimple), and with 800 people one after another praising how well it worked for them, it generated a stronger buzz and more traffic- Google traffic started to skyrocket after 20+ comments a day came in and 2-3 during dip periods (quiet periods)...

Don't underestimate any dynamic tool (polls, comments, rss feeds, etc...).

Just rethinking this. Where is the proof that it was your comments and not just time bringing it to the front as other items were less read. My experience is that google pays far more attention to the fact that people spend 5 minutes to 30 minutes reading what one actually wrote. The comments could just be a coincidence. The fact is that most of my articles that do well don't have any comments on them.

I'm speaking only from my own opinion, but if I see comments on a page, I'm far more likely to read the actual content on the basis that someone else already has and felt it was good enough to comment on.

Not only that, but other comments can enforce your views and recommendations especially in sales articles. 

Granted you might get a few hate comments here or there, but it's easy enough to delete them and sometimes those comments are constructive and actually help you work better.

My opinion is that it can't hurt to include them, so with a little moderation they can only bring good! 

@ Paul and Jerrico, I agree, I tend to look to the comments section as a measure of credibility and the worthiness of my time when it comes to internet searches. We are such a social networking society I feel we have grown accustomed to caring about what others monitor as interesting or useful.

Proof is not easily acquired for things of this nature but what I do know is that we're in a web 2.0 *(soon to be 3.0, 3.0 being interactive marketing per say where personalization becomes a whole new concept) world and interactivity is the spice of websites in this era- Google knows it.

I would feel a bit nieve to think that comments weren't pretty important. Also on sales pages/product type articles, comments are your bread and butter- if nobody comments they think your hiding some negative aspect about the product- why won't you let others comment? that's how I feel when I land on a page with no comments box or any way to interact with the author- often stolen content uses the no comments option because well they stole the content! this is a trend on those sites so it may stipulate that a site without comments may be hiding something (not always just my thinking personally).

As you said google is paying attention to the fact that people spend 5 minutes to 30 on a page- well commenting can take some time too, and many who read through dozens of comments (the ones on my hub were very engaging and interactive) spend a lot of time ON THE PAGE, same with videos... Comments also instill a sense of security for the reader- they don't know you from adam and they don't know if your information (article) is valid or not- personally I always check comments before engaging in an article to make sure it's not throwing fluff at me...

I'm not speaking for the entirety of the web but just from my personal experiences and views... You can build a site and do well WITHOUT a comments box, granted, but why not add that one element that really pushes people to share? Since google is looking at it as YOUR content why not give them (reader) a venue to spill their information all over your article in the comments box?

I've created entire articles JUST base on a comment I received that made me think, oh I should expand this! (the 800 comments elicited 15 3k word pages by the way- I gathered enough intel in just the comments to add entire sections to the concept to expand it for the benefit of the reader (furthering their research is always the goal).... comments are gold in my opinion- and with moderation there's no need to worry about spam and the like, just set it to moderate. The problem with facebook is you can't really moderate what people post live, I think I remember some feature you could turn on but by default it's off... 

Life... in moderation LOL

Tess: 01/03/2013 - 01:02 PM

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Just rethinking this. Where is the proof that it was your comments and not just time bringing it to the front as other items were less read. My experience is that google pays far more attention to the fact that people spend 5 minutes to 30 minutes reading what one actually wrote. The comments could just be a coincidence. The fact is that most of my articles that do well don't have any comments on them.

Exactly...

it's ironic I'm working on an article called: Online Marketing Is Deeply About Mutually Beneficial Networking been chipping away at it...

katiem2: 01/03/2013 - 01:43 PM

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@ Paul and Jerrico, I agree, I tend to look to the comments section as a measure of credibility and the worthiness of my time when it comes to internet searches. We are such a social networking society I feel we have grown accustomed to caring about what others monitor as interesting or useful.

Jerrico_Usher: 01/03/2013 - 02:31 PM

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Exactly...

it's ironic I'm working on an article called: Online Marketing Is Deeply About Mutually Beneficial Networking been chipping away at it...

katiem2: 01/03/2013 - 01:43 PM

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@ Paul and Jerrico, I agree, I tend to look to the comments section as a measure of credibility and the worthiness of my time when it comes to internet searches. We are such a social networking society I feel we have grown accustomed to caring about what others monitor as interesting or useful.

 WOW can't wait to read it! 

Katie I'm working on it now it should be ready in an hour or so... just adding monetize and pictures....here's where it'll be:

http://wizzley.com/online-marketing-mutually-beneficial-networking/

Okay. Thank you, Paul. I was actually looking for proof. No Jerrico, proof is not easily come by, and that's how urban myths grow and people can spend an awfully long time pursuing the wrong thing. Anyway, you've both answered my questions. For my purposes, I'll stick with how i'm doing things. :)

I do look at comments but it's the quality, not quantity, of the comments that matters.

A blog or website overrun by spammy comments, or extremely negative or hateful comments, shows a lack of moderation, which to me suggests that the owner or admin is either absent or lazy.

I also find that a whole bunch of vague nice comments that offer little or no intelligent commentary can look spammy.  This is because I think that some bloggers comment on other blogs (leaving comments devoid of intelligent commentary) only to gain visibility for their own blog.

Intelligent comments are great though.  There are some posts where I think the comments are more insightful or useful than the original post, and when I encounter a post that is thought-provoking, I really like to see how other people respond to it.

I recommend setting comments to require approval and moderation, if you have a problem, rather than outright disabling them.  This requires a little extra work, but it enables you to get the best of both worlds.  You get the benefits of the increased commentary on your page, but you can choose not to publish anything that you think would make your page look bad, whether it's spammy or just too negative.

thanks, but it actually upsets me to have to read other people's vitriolic remarks. There are so many trolls around. When I compare articles that do well against those that don't do well, it's not the number of comments that indicate a pattern. 

I agree with cazort - it is always a good idea to hold comments for moderation. The logic is that you will have to read the comment once eventually, because you don't want unsupervised comments posting automatically and possibly going unchecked for a long period of time.

If a comment is on hold for a few days or more, that's ok. I just browse through them all when I can get to them (I have 5 blogs and cannot check them daily with everything else to do) and click the approve button as I go...usually with morning coffee!

cazort: 01/03/2013 - 04:55 PM

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Intelligent comments are great though.  There are some posts where I think the comments are more insightful or useful than the original post, and when I encounter a post that is thought-provoking, I really like to see how other people respond to it.

I recommend setting comments to require approval and moderation, if you have a problem, rather than outright disabling them.  This requires a little extra work, but it enables you to get the best of both worlds.

I agree completely with this part! SY

All the time. And I have had articles that hit between 15,000 and 20,000 articles per day that haven't had a single comment. In fact, on blogger some of my articles that have never had a single comment in the years  that they have been there do between 50 and 100 hits every day.

2uesday: 01/03/2013 - 05:27 PM

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Can you get an article here to 100% without any comments?

Traffic, likes, and EC can get you there, too.

What's EC? And how come I get traffic without doing all these things. Never even backlinked. For years, my article generated about a 1000 hits a day on the history of bullet trains. Then I deleted it from AC, and obviously, it wasn't there anymore. But it still got traffic. No comments. No backlinks. No comments on the forum or comments underneath.

Well, the thing 2uesday, if comments worked, then it would be a consistent pattern that a majority of articles with comments would do well while those without comments would do poorly. I have never noticed that. I have found that it doesn't matter whether there are comments or not. I also find that whether an article does well or not has a lot to do with how many other articles there are on the web about that particular topic and how many people are searching for it.

Nobody enjoys criticism especially negative criticism but you can't let that put you in a box either. I had to learn to take constructive criticism and to deal with negative posts just to make me a stronger person overall, but although those posts can be alarming you have to ask yourself how much your reading the comment just analytically and how much your taking it personally.

Also writing about controversial topics is just asking for those people to magnetize to your comments section. Maybe don't put CB's on those articles in particular but it also takes away from potential back and forth.

@Cazort good point, it's not the quantity but the quality. With moderation I was left with 854 comments of what would have been many thousands... lots of spam, negative comments, and the like were eliminated over the years. Intelligent comments are phenomenal- and lead to updating the article itself or spinning off new articles.

back to @Tess: Fact is there will always be people out there that are rude, insensitive, and provocative in a negative way, but that's life. Ultimately it's your choice to use or not use comments and there is no wrong or right answer as to should you or shouldn't you- It's relative when you boil it down, you have your reasons for not wanting one (which are good reasons), and I have reasons I use them pretty much every time... I can respect your reasons especially because they used to be mine too, one bad comment on something your incredibly proud of can ruin a day a week, a year even... IF you let it. Not letting it is the hard part. Good luck either way Tess, great thread!

Jerrico

Tess: 01/03/2013 - 05:00 PM

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thanks, but it actually upsets me to have to read other people's vitriolic remarks. There are so many trolls around. When I compare articles that do well against those that don't do well, it's not the number of comments that indicate a pattern. 

or Elated Content

2uesday: 01/03/2013 - 06:25 PM

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Thank you, I have been puzzling over that for a while. 

EC that could be Editor's Choice or Extra Cool  .