Moderate blog comments Yes/No? Facebook comment plugin?

[mmaes]

I was reading outbound marketing and they suggest that a good blog "does not" moderate comments. I have always taken the moderate approach, but their thought was this inhibits a conversation from taking place on the blog.

I am wondering what thoughts others may have on this and its potential positive and negative impacts, both SEO and in general.

Also I am thinking about using a Facebook plugin with my blogposts. I think this may be a good way to help get social visibility... Has anyone tried this yet?

[StoresDirect]

It all depends on whether you like your blog being littered with comment spam. I prefer to moderate comments, and I think this is okay so long as you respond to them quickly. You may end up with fewer comments, but at least they are genuine. Blogs are often set up to automatically nofollow links in comments, but I would make sure of this before opting out of moderation.

If you have a very active, high profile blog then I think moderating comments really could impede participation. You would have to make a judgement call on how much of an issue that could be to you. I've seen advice that you shouldn't allow comments at all until you've got 1000+ views a day, based on the idea that sparsity of comments is a clear indicator that your blog is obscure. Again it's a judgement call.

I haven't tried the Facebook plugin so can't comment on that.

[RyanKent]

I was reading outbound marketing and they suggest that a good blog "does not" moderate comments.

I agree with not moderating comments with respect to any and all legitimate feedback. I would not remove or alter negative information or an opposing viewpoint.

I would definitely remove any spam or offensive content. To do otherwise is a poor site practice. I would think the intent of the article you read is related to the above idea. Perhaps they already have an excellent spam filter in place.

Also I am thinking about using a Facebook plugin with my blogposts. I think this may be a good way to help get social visibility... Has anyone tried this yet?

I believe Jen wrote an excellent article on this topic and I'll try to find the link.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-facebook-marketing-tactics-you-might-not-know-about

If you desire even more info, do a Search on SEOmoz for "facebook comments". There are tons of Q&As and other articles on this topic.

[jennita]

I agree with Ryan for the most part. Here at SEOmoz we get so many comments for each post that if we moderated each comment, it would seriously kill the conversation. However we have a team of people who watch for spam, plus we do have moderation set up for people who have less than 25 Mozpoints and have a link in their comment. At that point one of the team members has to approve the comment, remove a spammy link or delete the comment all together.

In general I'm not a fan of moderating especially if the person moderating checks comments infrequently. Nothing bothers me more than leaving a well thought out comment on someone's blog post in reply to the post itself or another comment and it taking 2 days to finally show up on the site. I wouldn't bother commenting on that blog again.

There's a fine line between moderating and keeping the spam out and if you can find that you're golden.

As for Facebook comments, I haven't personally implemented them on any sites but many people who use them have really loved it. Ryan linked to my post on using them and it seems like a great marketing/virality tool for sure. Facebook gives you easy moderation as well and I think it cuts back on spam quite a bit because it has to be a real user logged into Facebook in order to comment.

Hope this helps!