I run a fair old number of blogs, many of them operating purely as sales vehicles for niche products or categories.
WordPress is a great tool to enable you to do that. However, you may just want to have a look at your comment settings or even the comments that get posted to your blog. They may just be working to your disadvantage.
Here are just a few things to consider in whether to allow comments :
Pro and Con’s around comments
PRO : Comments can create a sense of community,
PRO : They can keep a page looking fresher which might look better to SEs., but
CON : it can also introduce a whole host of spam workload to manage those comments.
CON : the comments can disrupt your carefully optimised keyword density
CON : can create a doorway for malicious code to be injected for older blog solutions or to link to a malicious site (the site may not be malicious today, but could be next week)
CON : Competitors can comment leveraging your site’s relevance on their link back.
It is also worth considering whether the links should be FOLLOW or NOFOLLOW (recommended and standard within WordPress for commenters website link).
I had cause to think a little more on this myself in the last week when I spotted a merchant (with whom I am affiliated too) practising some linkbuilding by commenting on my blogs complete with their own link. I contacted the merchant and they agreed to get their SEO company away from my sites. DO YOU KNOW who is commenting on your sites?
Don’t ne afraid to edit comments either … it is your site and you can take editorial control of comments that have been left e.g. to add [product name] etc to help maintain keyword density.
I am not here today to preach one way or the other – comments on or comments off, but I think that you need to consider each site on its merits … and if you do allow comments, then do take care to review and manage them and make sure that your optimisation isn’t compromised by them.
