It seems like common sense, but if your blog carries your name or your businesses’ name, then the weight of monitoring or moderating the blog lies on you or a representative you name.

A tactic among spam marketers seems to be placing innocent comments on blog posts to do a recon on the comment procedures on a blog.

It typically involves a generic comment like “Hi” or “Nice blog”, and it may have an originating domain, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Which seems innocent and you might be tempted to approve the comment.

But again, the blog is a reflection of your personal branding. What’s it say about you, if the ‘best’ comments to your posts are along the lines of “nice blog” or “way to go!”

Even if it was posted by a somewhat naive/new reader with the best of intentions, it’s in your best interests to weed those out.

The nature of comments and trackbacks are to continue the conversation or build on the dialogue. If it does nothing to achieve that purpose, I’d suggest to delete without mercy.

If the person is especially flagant about it, label their comment as spam, and your filters will take care of it.

My blog moderation procedures:

• My support staff spends about 30 minutes each day, going through the comments which are pending (all comments are human moderated), and check the originating URL.
• I’ve found that blog registration is an added layer of inconvenience and creates barriers to an ongoing dialogue, so we’re done away with that.
• Comments are usually moderated within 12 hours of submission, though we shoot for 6 hours.
• If a comment contains little content, it will likely not be published.

Link dropping: In my opinion, it’s very bad to drop links in your comments, unless they’re relevant. My tech team has been active on dial-up BBSes, IRC, MMPOGs, online game networks, social networking sites and forums since the early 80s. They’re pretty good at identifying link bait. Unless you’re proficient at dropping links, they’d usually be edited out, or the comment deleted altogether.

Publicity whores beware: On the average, we receive about 3-5 comments each day, which would have been better submitted through the contact form. These are generally of the biz-op or joint venture category.

Take heed if you adopt this as a standard practise. It sends the signal that you’re:

• New at this, and haven’t figured out the difference between a comment and a contact/mailto form yet.
• Hankering for some publicty
• Using some questionable mass blog comment JV strategy (which tells us you really haven’t put much thought into targeting your partners)
• All of the above

We might still have the chance to work together, though you’d likely be flagged as somewhat ‘questionable’ in our books, and a comfortable working level will take longer to establish.