I have recently written a post titled PRICED RIGHT=SOLD!. On it, I received a couple comments that I found strange and since have deleted. Perhaps I am feeling sensitive, but...
Is it rude to have your website link on your comments??
The first comment was a blatant add for some crap he was selling. He made no mention of my post.
The second said only, "Nice job. Keep it going" and his website.
Both made me uncomfortable. Am I wrong? What is the blogging etiquette?
Thanks,
Ken
Not a great thing to do to advertise yourself but if there's a related blog or site that would provide you or your readers with additional info I don't have a problem personally with it.
Hi Ken,
Thank you for posting this question! I found out recently (the hard way) that it is bad etiquette and most bloggers simply do not appreciate the links. As a newbie to AR, I soooo appreciate the fact that this community will inform and educate the users, and I for one will keep my responses clean from now on.
I don't see much of it! We’re low maintenance baby. Thanks for small favors. KOW
If I get comment spam from a competitor, I delete the comment. Otherwise, I suppose it depends on the sender.
The guidlines advise against it.
I used to e-mail folks and ask them to just remove their links in comments on my posts, but I got a few folks who got nasty. So, now I just delete.
Hey I think Brian's comment was the best. Many new members do not know better, in fact when I first Joined Active Rain...I didn't know...so I can imagine if you educate the new members they will comply. Great Post Topic!
Tom Davis - A Delaware Realtor Comment
It is ok to leave link(s) in comments if they are relevant for the original subject matter. Otherwise, it's SPAM. I like to see the web site URLs of others who leave comments, it allows me to go to their blog and if I like what they talk about, subscribe to their feed. I do not have a field to leave my personal blog URL, but that's ok, getting to my personal blog is easy, it's angelo dot mandato dot com. :-)
By the way, your comments text editor encourages people to highlight text to add web links. If you really want to discourage links, perhaps you should get rid of the styled text editor for comments.
The blog owner has the right to make up what ever rules they want when approving comments. You should not feel obligated to publically state why or how you decide if a comment is considered SPAM or not. On the same token, making link rules and such can effectively discourage participation from the blogging community. I'm almost torn whether I should even share my opinion about this actually. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's better not to make rules and moderate things yourself than to make rules and deal with the negative fallout. Plus, what happens when you have to break such a rule when a blog post requires comments from users with URL references?
A side note, Wordpress has a couple excellent plugins in order to combat SPAM comments. Natively, there is a setting to mark messages as spam if they include more than X links in them.
Wow. I have been gone for two days. Thanks for reading, everyone.
This post was featured? It must have been a good question.
I certainly did not expect this much activity from this post.
Ken
I hate comment spam. Sometimes I will post a link in a comment (NOT to my site) but to something that is relevant to the conversation, and I ask permission first.
There are some people who do NOT do this naively, and they do it intentionally. They don't care that they get no google juice from them, what they care about is that the readers reading the blog will click on the link out of curiosity.
Spam does not last long on my blog. As soon as I see it, it's gone.
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