We have been trading as a business insurance broker for nearly 11 years now. We are part of a larger group who have been trading for over 50 years. As a result we have unrivalled knowledge of all things relating to commercial insurance. We try, through or blog, to part with this knowledge and genuinely try and help customers, potential customers or others just looking for advice.
If you are a regular reader, you will know that the topics can be wide-ranging, sometimes bizarre but all the time aimed at provided that one piece of advice or help that is required.
We have learned our lesson though, as far as allowing comments is concerned. When we moved to Wordpress from Blogger, we allowed comments for the first couple of months. We thought, extremely naively, at the time that we would be able to interact, shoot the breeze or just help some people that were stuck with general insurance questions.
We thought that spam comments were no longer used. But how wrong we were. Every blog post that we did had, at times, dozens of spam comments. There was nothing scientific or clever about them, they were just filled with random words and if there were phrases, then it was obviously from someone using very, very poor translation software.
So, in early 2010 we deliberately set the default to block comments. It was with sadness in a way because if people did need help then they were not going to get it from correspondence on our blog. As people can call us, local rate, then it was agreed that having this option was probably better. We offer on our site that we will give commercial insurance advice, for free and we do still find people calling us to check something or just get an honest answer.
But, we are stil getting over a hundred spam comments a day on blog posts over a year old. How can this be beneficial to these people? There must be a financial reason for doing this, as there is a financial cost to send out these comments. I just cannot understand how the big search engines cannot tell that these crap comments are there for one reason and one reason alone.
I know that the spammers like to try and keep one step ahead, but it really is frustrating to have physically delete thousands upon thousands of comments every month. Maybe as time goes on things will get a bit better.