subject: Moderate Your Comments For Spam's Sakes! [print this page] Creating a web page isn't enough if you're hoping to draw customers in. You need to also establish yourself with the dominant search engines. As of writing this article, those are Google, Yahoo, and BING (MSN).
I won't get into the specifics, but a LARGE part of that process involves creating networks of links from other sites, to yours.
Now, in a perfect world, everyone would do this legitimately. However, we all know we don't live in a perfect world (not even close, though, perhaps that's why it's so beautiful?)
That said, a very easy method by which people can illegitimately increase their site's ranking with dominant search engines such as the ones listed above, is by posting comments on people's blogs or articles, and simply including a link to their own website from that blog.
If the website they were backlinking (as we call it) to was a golf website, or perhaps a nice fluffy teddy bear website, perhaps we wouldn't care. Unfortunately, these backlinks are almost always to pornographic sites. To exemplify this, I run a fairly new blog and already in the last 10 days I've had to mark over 10 comments as spam. This is very real, and will happen. Do NOT let unmoderated comments through!
So, in a nut shell - ENSURE that whether you're using a custom-written CMS, or a WordPress-style system, you enable comment moderation. Set yourself a reminder to check for new comments daily and go about it that way. You'll save yourself some bad publicity and help to prevent cheating sites from gaining an even larger hold on our e-market
Happy Tuesday!
This article written by Joey Alain, owner and operator of Rubix Computer Solutions, a kamloops web design and development company. http://www.rubixpc.com.
