7 Things to Avoid While Leaving A Blog Comment

Many people already wrote about the rules of blog comments before. Most of them, however, focused on the so called blog comments etiquette. That is, they told you how you should always add value to the discussion, respect the other people, never feed the trolls, be genuine and yada yada yada.

While that advice is solid, I feel that it lacks some practical sense. There are other points that I see people doing almost daily when leaving comments, and they can be equally annoying for the blog owner and for the other readers and commentators. Below you will find them: 7 things to avoid while leaving a blog comment.

1. Using the bold or italic attributes to highlight your whole comment

Blog comments can send good traffic to your website, and if you manage to catch people’s attention with your comments, this traffic might increase. Now, attention should be grabbed with a funny or interesting comment, and not by making your comment text bold or italicized.

Use bold only or specific words that you want to put in evidence, and italics on names and titles of books and similar.

2. Signing your comment

As you probably have already noticed, most comment forms ask for your name on the first input box. That is, you already signed your comment even before writing it, so there is no need to finish the comment with your name a second time.

Apart from being redundant information, it is also annoying for some people. For more on this topic read “If You Sign Your Blog Comments, You Are a Dork.”

3. Including a second (or third) link to your website

The previous point applies to website links also. Most comment forms allow you to include a URL that will be used to hyperlink your name. If you include that URL at the end of your footer a second time it will give the impression that you are just spamming the comment section for some links.

4. Leaving a comment without reading the article first

Common sense you say? I wouldn’t bet on it. I have seen a huge amount of comments, both on my and on other blogs, from people that had no clue about the topic of the article in question.

Sometimes they knew what the article was about, but they interpreted the message from the author on a completely different way.

If you are going to leave a comment, make sure that you have read and understood the article to begin with.

5. Leaving a one-word comment

It might be the case that people leaving comments such as “Great!” or “Thanks!” truly read the article and mean it. Regardless, those comments will be considered as spam.

Just take the effort to come up with a complete sentence, will you?

6. Leaving a second trackback

If you link to another post on your blog, your blogging software will send a notice to that blog, which will in turn create a link pointing back to your post on the comments section. This is called a trackback.

Sometimes trackbacks will not work, and in this case you could leave a comment mentioning that you wrote about the post in question. If the trackback worked, however, you would be spamming that blog by leaving a second comment with a link pointing to your article.

7. Leaving a comment as if you are the know-it-all guru on the subject

Whenever I come across a comment that begins with “This is just stupid…” or “You are so wrong…” I already arm myself against potential nonsense ahead.

If you disagree with the opinions of the author, express it politely. Even if you are right about the issue you will be seen as a jerk if you come with the I-know-it-all attitude.

Just take it easy.

Update: Obviously these are my opinions, so feel free to disagree. And if you are guilty of one of these points, remember that it is not a big deal. Just keep it in mind for future comments!