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This past summer I shut down the comments for this blog site. You can probably guess the reasons. When your site is hacked, it is not a pleasant experience and I instanatly went into lock-down mode. Still not sure what the root cause was and I am still not convinced it was because of comments, but in any case I took the precautions.
The sad part about this is that I also stopped posting comments on other people’s sites and went directly to social media to add my comments. To me, this is good but not the best way of giving back. People need to help each other out and post comments directly to other people’s sites. To me, it is no differnet than talking about someone in an article and personally sending a letter or note to that particular person.
There are a number of times that people will come up to me and tell me they retweeted or reposted my information on a social media site. I try to look for these types of sightings, but there really is no way to recognize all of those people who have commented about an article I wrote.
If you have shut down your comments in the past, maybe you should try opening yourself up a little more and see what happens. There is a movement on to be more conversational and comments are definitely a part of the new alogrithm for Bing and Google, (Google Hummingbird). You may want to consider comments as a part of your overall online content marketing inititaive.
Image courtesy of Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
