I feel now is a great time to revisit the topic of blog comment policies. A while ago, I published an entry outlining how to develop a blog comment policy for your own website using my comment policy as an example, so this entry isn’t necessarily about how to craft one (that’s already been handled), but more to those who actually comment.

Although I spoke out against using a cookie-cutter comment service like Buy Blog Comments some time ago, I don’t see anything wrong with outsourcing your comments as long as it’s done properly.

Unfortunately, the comments I’ve been seeing more and more of recently are easily pegged as manual spam.

Manual Comment Spam

This, I believe, occurs because my website is on a number of “dofollow” lists since it’s no secret that I don’t use the nofollow attribute in my comments section.

It seems that many of those who are commenting on behalf of someone else (or even trying to promote their own sites) don’t realize that though I do follow, I actively moderate comments for inappropriate links–a fact that is explicit in the comment policy. The last thing I need is for my website to start linking out to any bad neighborhoods or websites that would fly in the face of my readership’s sensibilities.

If you come across a blog where you don’t know the owner personally and would like to leave a comment, check around to see if they do have a few notes on what is allowed in their comments. Some bloggers will have it just above the comment box itself and others will have a special page.

Make sure you at least skim their guidelines before leaving your thoughts, especially if part of the goal of leaving the comment is to market your website. And if you’re in doubt, avoid leaving a URL the first time around, or when leaving your URL, don’t use anchor text–use your name and a valid email address. Let the blog owner know you’re not just a fly-by-night commenter trying to siphon their link juice.

Chances are, if that blogger took the time to write their comment policy, they will take the time to enforce it. It does you no good if you take the time to write a great comment that ends up having your link removed, or deleted, or marked as spam simply because you couldn’t be bothered to read and comply with that blogger’s comment policy.