Blog commenting & comment moderation ethics

Blog commenting, of late, has moved away from its original goals of being topic relevant & an opportunity to network and discuss with people of similar interests. These days it is all about SEO (Search Engine Optimization), backlink building and (shortsighted) short term traffic boost mechanism.

Budding bloggers get caught on to this trap and at times get banned, ignored and finally frustrated for not obtaining the desired results. A few things that everyone needs to understand is comments are still comments and unless you go wise on it your blog commenting strategy can really backfire.

The questions to you all is:

- Do you have a bunch of bloggers on whose blogs you comment regularly?

- Are you doing the above mostly to keep the network alive or because you have really something to say?

- Do you do a lot of commenting for SEO/backlink building purpose?

- Have you ever got banned by blog spam protection agents like akismet? (I have got banned once when I was a clueless blogger)

Happy Blogging!