Links in comments

1. 85

   lovebuglenaposted 6 years ago

   Someone left a comment on one of my hubs and it has a link in it to another website. Am I allowed to approve the comment?

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   1. 88

      Christy Kirwanposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Comment moderation is up to you (HubPages will never penalize you). If you think the link is genuinely useful to your readers and not spammy, you may approve it (though if it is, in fact, identified by Google as a spammy link, your article will still be penalized in search rankings). We recommend not permitting comments with links, but if you are certain it's beneficial and safe, it's fine to allow it.

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      1. 80

         kenneth averyposted 6 years agoin reply to this

         @ Christy I think that you are doing a great job.

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   2. 81

      Wesman Todd Shawposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      Yes, you can certainly do what you wish with the comment. What you don't want are comments with links which direct someone to something shady. Does the comment and the link add to the discussion? Is it relevant? So long as it doesn't take you to something shady or completely off topic, there isn't a problem.

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2. 96

   EricDockettposted 6 years ago

   As a rule, I do not approve comments with links in them anymore. I think it's important to control where the links go from your Hub. A link to a bad neighborhood can be damaging. Even if the link looks okay to begin with, the page can be changed or the link redirected in the future.
   
   Usually comments with links are spam, so that's a no-brainer. But sometimes a reader leaves a genuinely useful comment with a link telling me to go read this or check out their post on their site. In those cases, it would be nice if we could accept the comment but snip the link.
   
   I'm also not sure if the link checker tool scans links in the comments. If a link in the comments becomes dead or associated with spam will  the link checker catch it?

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   1. 85

      lovebuglenaposted 6 years agoin reply to this

      I decided to not approve the comment just to be safe. My hub was about swagbucks and someone shared a link to another site people can join to make $.

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3. 53

   jrk1121posted 6 years ago

   EricDockett - "Usually comments with links are spam"
   
   This used to be true with WordPress but Akismet catches all of that now. Giving the user a place to put a link, maybe not on HubPages, but a relevant link and they usually come back for more. There is nothing wrong with a relevant comment link if the user is adding something meaningful to the article or conversation. I see it as more of a trade off as long as it's relevant.

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