Like all budding blog owners, I relish the idea that I might get a comment or three from appreciative (or indeed non-appreciative) readers out there.

I have had one or two successful posts in this regard, albeit they haven't exactly set the world on fire, and that feeling of, first, getting some recognition from other people in the community and, second, being asked to elaborate further (for example) is really quite satisfying.

So, when I first setup this blog I left my comments unmoderated, so anybody could post a comment, and I could retrospectively get rid of any that were irrelevant.

A year later, however, and some of those pages that I've had up a while now, that get a decent google hit-rate, started to get loads and loads of irrelevant comments.  Stuff like:

"Informative details presented nicely with good concepts and good ideas", which was from "Cosmetic Dentistry Belfast" [with a direct weblink that I'm clearly not going to include!].  This was on my post about serializing to XML attributes with the WCF DataContractSerializer.

My personal favourite, however, had to be "Hi there, I found your blog via Google while searching for first aid for a heart attack and your post looks very interesting for me.", from "bad credit loans".  Really? Heart attacks?  I never thought that fixing the VMWare 2 Console would help cure a heart attack!

So I switched over to moderated comments, because I simply cannot allow my blog, however small and unimportant it might be, to overrun with the Japanese Knotweed of the internet - that is - crappy web 'masters' promising good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for their clients by going around and spamming the comments pages of genuine people's blogs.  It's the grafitti of the internet (okay, so I'm switching metaphors; apologies) and should be eradicated.

Of course it can't - unless every blog in the world becomes moderated.  At least then these people would be restricted to the other amusing practise of setting up fake blogs with meaningless content, just so they can get those hyperlinks our there.

With the way that internet searching is done today, there is simply no substitute for good-quality content.  If your site is crap, then no amount of trying to bump it up the rankings is really going to work. 

On the JobServe Labs website, we've written two quite heavy technical articles, one about coding XML RPC backend for a MetaWeblog interface in WCF for .Net and another on how to write an OpenSearch provider in C# with WCF (includes a demo solution to download too! Sorry, shameless plug over).  Now these pages (despite my shameless plugs now) are hardly linked to by anybody at all, but already they are getting really high page rankings for quite short searches on Google (and Bing) - because the content itself rocks.

Obviously, I understand that people have to promote their website, either because they want to be famous (like me!); or because somebody's paid them money to get the site up and running and 'on google'.  However, if you are one of those people, please don't try to dress up a comment as being anything other than a shameless plug.

You could argue that I'm doing with this post is back-linking to JobServe; however, the primary purpose of this post is as a warning to all you blog owners out there: moderate your comments, even if it takes time - you don't want your blog to be taken over by someone else's marketing needs!

A moment ago I had 67 comments ( in the space of just 2 weeks! ) awaiting moderation; and when I check, only one of them is legitimate.  The irony - when BlogEngine sends my webmaster account an email with the summary of the new comment; my email spam checker can recognise that the text is crap.  Most legitimate comments, however, go straight to my inbox!

Let's see how many attempts I get on this article itself!