Paid Comments Are a Disservice to Readers
There was a time when I was trying to start out a forum. I desperately tried to sign up new members and encourage those members to participate. But forum members aren’t obligated to start conversations, or even to reply to open threads. I seriously considered purchasing a package where someone would post paid replies to give my forum the impression of being active. If I would have engaged in such a technique back then, I believe it would have been an extreme disservice to my readers.
Last week a new service came to my attention that would allow a blogger to branch out to other blogs by purchasing comments. The service is called Buy Blog Comments and allows you to buy a 100 comments for under twenty US dollars.
While the argument can be made that the comments will be quality and that the average reader will not be able to tell a paid comment from a legitimate comment, I feel that readers are the ones that are getting the shaft on this technique. Now a blogger must question whether a comment left is legit or paid. A legitimate reader’s comment might be undervalued, and some bloggers might opt to just turn off comments period, not giving the reader many avenues for feedback.
Jon Waraas said in a comment that paid links will look legitimate:
The quality will be great. You wont even know its a paid comment. Hell this could even be one…
However, Darren from ProBlogger went on to speculate why the quality will not be good:
At $19.99 for 100 posts you’re paying them 19 cents per comment. For someone living in the US or Canada to make a decent living at 19 cents per comment (he says they are US/Canadian citizens that make the comments) how many comments would they need to leave in a day? To make $100 they’d have to leave 526 comments. An 8 hour day has 480 minutes in it. They’d need to be leaving comments at over 1 per minute.
My calculations came out to a little over 500 comments to make a hundred dollars, but that is still quite a bit of comments to make for such a little sum. So it remains to be seen whether the quality will be there.
In summary, here is why I do not agree with paid comments:
- It cheapens the value of blog comments.
- It will make it much harder to label comments as spam.
- Bloggers must question whether a comment is paid or legit.
- The blogger who bought the comments might suffer a negative reputation (for good reason).
- The service might prey on new and unexperienced bloggers.
- The comments will drown out the comments of legitimate commenters.
- The service appears to be nothing but a black hat SEO technique.
What do you think? Would you ever pay to have someone leave comments on other blogs for you? What would you think of a blogger if you found out he/she was purchasing comments.
Update: For an opposing view, please visit Why Everyone - Including Google Should Ignore Buying Links.
Snoskred says...
I think if a blogger is spending time questioning whether a comment is legit or paid, they might need a new hobby. Seriously. How much time can anyone afford to spend on worrying over things like that? Time would be better spent in a myriad of ways..
I have to say when I first heard of this I was really concerned that people would automatically assume I am a spammer when I comment on their blogs. But reality has now set in and I have to admit this is not something I can control in any way.
I like commenting on blogs. I enjoy it. I’ve put a little thing on my sidebar to explain that. If someone can’t click to my blog to check out whether I am for real or not, that’s their issue. If they delete my comment they’d be doing *themselves* a disservice.
I can tell you, making real comments which are relevant to the blog and the discussion is no easy task. I’ve done commenting challenges before and the most comments I could do in a day was 140. That was working hard for between 6-8 hours. I don’t think the guy who is selling these things has any idea of the amount of time it will take, and the people he is paying small amounts for each comment to will not stick at the job long..
I think we’ve all paid him a lot more attention than he is worth over this issue and we should get back to the more important things in life..
Snoskred
http://snoskred.blogspot.com/
Ronald Huereca says...
Snoskred,
I will indeed get on to more important things. I just wanted to get my thoughts out on the matter. I agree that the paid comments are not really a sustainable business model unless exploiting cheap labor is possible.
Snoskred says...
Oh, you took my comment the wrong way - that wasn’t what I meant..
I meant this has probably been the most blogged about thing recently, especially on the no no follow blogs. Which is more than likely exactly what this Jon whatever his name is wanted. He’s got a shed load of links back to himself, and that will increase his page rank etc.. and I’d disable that link to him - surely you don’t want to give him more exposure? 
It should not change anything we do as bloggers in my opinion, though. If bloggers spend even one second second guessing a comment thanks to this dimwit, he wins and WE all lose. ;(
Snoskred
http://snoskred.blogspot.com/
Ronald Huereca says...
Snoskred,
No problem. I added the no-follow attribute to the link, but I’ll probably leave it in so people can see for themselves instead of taking my word for it. Thanks for the feedback and weighing in.
Jack Spirko says...
Personally I think way and I mean way to much is being made over this. Some bloggers in the dofollow community are actually talking about going back to adding nofollow over this. That is just plain stupid. The way I feel is simple is a person comments in my blogs, the comment is relevant and on topic and the link does not go to some “bad thing” and otherwise complies with my comment policy I am fine with it. Who actually wrote the comment and what the “intent” was means absolutely nothing to me only that it meets the rules of my personal comment policy.
Everyone needs to realize that this is nothing but the latest topic du jour and just have a beer and rock on with life. Basically those saying nofollow is the solution to this are saying,
Comment spam gave birth to rel=”nofollow”, people realized it did nothing to solve the problem and screwed over posters. So the do-follow movement occurred which has led to people comment spamming, which means we might as well use nofollow again, which did not work in the first place.
Sound like a circle of insanity? There’s a reason, it is!
The simple facts are if the comments are relevant to your blog, who cares if the poster or the guy who hired him gets some link juice? Anyone who does can’t see the forest for the trees! The reality is comments make your blog better; they improve your search traffic as well.
I believe all they hype around this is being swelled underground by Google because they hate the dofollow movement! They are trying to kill any paid links or any links a user can easily create or hire someone else to create. Why? Because they can’t fix their own algorithms, that’s why.
This “war on paid links” has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with money, don’t be fooled and stop worrying. The Internet has done fine for a long time now and it keeps getting better, like us or not SEOs are a big part of why!
Here is an article I wrote on Paid Links in general,
Please visit Why Everyone - Including Google Should Ignore Buying Links.
That pretty much sums up how I feel about this whole thing,
~ Jack Spirko
Simonne says...
I think that the price is low, so I don’t expect paid comments to be of good quality. If they were, I wouldn’t mind to have them on my blog. I wouldn’t bother to try to figure out whether a comment is genuine or not. However, I would not buy comments, because this would be very much similar to allow somebody to speak for myself and I find this dangerous and out of my control, because a comment is something that I cannot take back later on.
Ronald Huereca says...
Hey Jack,
I went ahead and linked to your post at the bottom of mine. It’s nice to see opposing view points. I don’t disagree with paid-for comments from a SEO perspective. I disagree with it from a reader’s and blogger’s perspective. If a reader interacts with a paid commenter, then what?
Also, what about the bloggers who genuinely try hard to comment and build relationships when some other blogger can dish out some cash. To me, it is laziness to pay someone else to do your dirty work, but it happens in all circles of life, so oh well. I think I’m off to get my Valium.
Snoskred says...
I went and read a bit more about buying these blog comments, and it seems the guy is saying “Your Backlinks will only be from the “username” Field in the comments, they will not be in the comment body, we would lose quality if we did that.” So, the answer to this is, we should all put a sign off at the bottom of our comments..
That way bloggers and readers can know we are genuine commenters.. 
Snoskred has a new home -
http://www.snoskred.org/
Ronald Huereca says...
Snoskred,
Right now I personally have no problem with people leaving a sign off. I do prefer people with long URLs to format their link. I edited Jack’s above since it was breaking the layout.
As Simonne stated above, I wouldn’t want someone else being my mouthpiece. I tell this to a lot of my friends who like to “convey” messages for me. I tell them, “Thanks for the offer, but I’m already pretty decent at burning my own bridges.”
Jack Spirko says...
First sorry on the long link, you just never know when you can anchor a link with text and when you can’t. A lot of freaked out bloggers who are worried about people using their blogs for links don’t allow ahref tagging for links. If you do allow that you may want to put that above the comments box.
Now on this issue I think the real problem is the disconnect between “Joe Blogger” and “Joe Siteowner”. As bloggers you guys keep worring about someone commenting “on your behalf”, this is not an issue for anyone who would buy comments. If you bought blog comments pointing to a typical blog that would just be stupid. What may make sense is for a commerical site to have a commenter link to his COMMERICIAL site.
Also bloggers around the net seem to thin it would be a terrible mistake to pay to have someone comment in your own blog. Really? So what and that is not what anyone is actually talking about. People are buying comments in OTHER PEOPLES blogs pointing back to them. Now an arguement could be made that having some paid commenters using your blog as a commenting space could actually improve it.
Again though this is simple, stop worring about trying to creat what I can only call “hate crime laws for the internet”. In other words police your own blog and judge the quality of the comment, not the intent. Do that and have a beer already this issue is just not as important as everyone seems to think it is and all these posts are doing is HELPING this guy get more business and giving him massive link popularity.
Ironic ain’t it!
Jack