When it comes to commenting on your blog site, you need to pay attention to what is going on. Not everybody who leaves a comment on your site is your friend. No matter how much they say they love your site, they may be playing games with you.
You see, the way that WordPress is set up by default, the first time a person leaves a comment, it must be approved by the administrator of the site (most likely that is you). After you have approved one comment from a certain individual, they are free to leave more comments without further approval. While I am sure that you want to have as many comments as possible on your site, you may not want what people will leave after getting that approval.
Spammers
You see, one thing that a lot of spammers do, or try to do, is to leave a very complimentary comment on your site, get your approval, and then start leaving additional comments (which don’t need further approval) that are nothing but advertisements for products that are, well, somewhat questionable. What kinds of products? The typical stuff that you find in Spam. Stuff that medications that treat erectile dysfunction and other types of similar things. In other words, stuff that you really don’t care to have advertised on your site.
The big key is that first approval of their comment. What they do is that they leave a comment talking about how great your blog is, how much they admire you, stuff like that. Look at their e-mail address, or the name that they put as their name, and often it is connected to products that are questionable at best. Be sure that you mark these kind of comments as Spam. If you do that, after a while Akismet, the default WordPress Spam filter will start recognizing that further comments from this e-mail address are also spam, and will automatically send the comment to the Spam folder.
Another thing is that if you approve these kinds of comments to appear on your blog, as time goes by, your site will fall in the search engine rankings, because you will be linking to what is called a “bad neighborhood.” Linking to sites that are unwholesome, or somehow just nothing but Spam. You don’t want that. It helps you in no way.
So, while having lots of comments is nice, and desirable, you want good comments. Real comments. Not comments that are left by Spam Bots from sites that you don’t want to associate with.
So, investigate before you click “Approve Comment.”