In this Ask Evan video, Evan Carmichael answers a forum question about whether to allow blog comments. He argues strongly in favor of enabling comments, explaining that they boost visitor engagement, increase time on site, and improve conversion rates by encouraging newsletter sign‑ups and purchases. Comments also provide valuable feedback on which posts resonate, offering ideas for improvement, and they serve as social proof, making a blog appear authoritative and trustworthy to new visitors, partners, and media. Carmichael stresses the necessity of moderation to filter spam and keep discussions constructive, recommending WordPress moderation plugins. For concerns about Google’s quality score and SEO impact, he suggests using Facebook Comments, which require a real Facebook account, reduce anonymous spam, can increase exposure via social sharing, and keep comment content out of the page’s HTML, preventing it from being indexed. He shares his own split approach: native WordPress comments on his blog and Facebook comments on article pages, and invites viewers to share their thoughts.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from my forum administrator GT, who kicked off a debate in our forums around the new post that he put up around should you allow blog comments on your blog or not. So his exact post was: I was just reading an article at WebProNews, and one of the subjects covered is whether or not you should allow blog comments on your blog. One point of view is that they're good because it provides user feedback and the opportunity to interact with visitors. The other point of view is that comments add little value and can often have a negative impact on your site. A Google engineer is quoted as saying that blog comments may possibly be diluting the quality score of a page. So he's wondering about it, he hasn't looked into it too much, and he was wondering our thoughts. Should you allow blog comments or not? So here's my take, I do allow blog comments and I do it two different ways and I'll share my experiences and hopefully this can help everybody. The first part is I really believe that you should allow blog comments on your site. I like it because it allows you to start interacting with your customers and people who are coming to your site and they start interacting are more likely to hang around, they're more likely to sign up for your newsletter, they're more likely to buy your products and services. So you want to encourage participation and interaction because it makes it a little more sticky, ties them to your brand and makes them want to come back. If there's no ability to comment, then they're less likely to come back and less likely to become a customer of your business. So you definitely want to encourage people to participate in your business, stay longer on your website, and be able to take that next step. If it's sign up for newsletter, buying your product, whatever it is. The second thing is I think it provides a lot of valuable feedback for you. So it tells you which posts you're creating are getting a lot of response. It tells you if people like the content you're coming up with or not. People might also offer other suggestions for how you can make your blog better. As businesses, if you want to become better entrepreneurs, we need to make sure we're listening to our customers, listening to their feedback, and trying to take those advice that we get from them and put it into our business to make it better. So shutting off the ability for people to tell us what they think, I don't think is a really smart idea. Now, the last part is, if you do write a blog and you are getting comments, it can also add a lot of credibility to your website. So when people first visit a blog, one of the things they'll see is how many comments are left on here. And if it sees that there's a lot of comments, it looks like it's an authority website and they're more likely to read the content. If they come to the site and see that there's no comments, a lot of people think, "Ah, I don't know if I wanna trust this person or not," and they may take off and go to a different site. So if you do have a blog with a lot of comments, it can add a lot of credibility which can help you with new customers coming in and also with media and partners and suppliers. It makes you look a little more respectable. Definitely try to encourage comments. Now that being said, you do need to moderate them, right? You need to make sure that it's value-add type of comments that are being put into your blog post and useful information, right? It's okay to have different point of views, but you have to make sure that it's being added to the conversation, it's not just being spam. There are some plugins you can use, especially if you're on a WordPress backend, to help you moderate your comments, but you definitely have to make sure you're looking out for them. The second part is if you're really worried about the negative impact it might have, the quality of comments aren't great, um, and you wanna make sure it's only your content that's being indexed in Google, another option you can use is Facebook comments. And some of the bigger blogs have moved to trying Facebook comments. And basically Facebook gives you a plugin to allow people to leave comments to their Facebook profile and it shows up on each individual blog post. And this is good in the sense that you can still get participation from your readers. It forces people to use their existing Facebook account, so it's harder to post anonymous posts. You have to use your own account, and it might even get you a little bit more exposure for your blog post because when they do put a post on, it sends it out to their friends that, hey, you know, they just posted on this blog, and their friends might be interested in checking out the blog as well. So it might give you some extra exposure. At the same time, it doesn't show up in your HTML, so the content of the block comments don't show up in your HTML, so Google doesn't crawl it. So that can be good or bad, but if you're worried about the quality score, then Facebook comments is a great way to do it because it's not gonna show up in the code of your site, so Google will never get it indexed. So GT, I hope that helps. Everybody else who's been discussing in the forums, I hope you found that useful. That's what I use on my blog. I'll use comments just like any other WordPress blog. And then on my articles on the site, we'll use Facebook comments. So we've kind of split it up between the two. I'd love to hear what you guys have to think. If you want to leave a comment below the video, please do, and please give the video a thumbs up. Uh, encourages me to make more of these types of videos, uh, and hopefully you'll stay tuned for the next episode.
