Have you ever written fake comments for yourself or someone else? If you haven’t, would you want to? Let’s look at what fake comments can do for you.

While writing fake comments can be enticing, it would also be somewhat obvious that some of your comments are fake.

The Author name and URL give a hint. When a lot of comments coming from one or more people without URLs, people become suspicious. People have tried to bypass that by creating various social networking accounts, but it would also be obvious if most URLs came from social networking sites.
In some situations, someone has posted your blog in a forum, so people go comment for a specific reason, but that is rare. Most people comment if they have a blog, for promotion and exposure.

Details in comments and writing style also leave hints. For example, a comment like this:

That is a great image. Turn the “Screen” option on when vectoring. Turn it off when writing text. Other than that, keep it up! Looking forward to seeing your work again!

versus

I totally love that! Make more!

People can tell if it is your writing style or not. Your writing style would be similar to the posting style, and the vocabulary would be similar.

Comment length goes with detail, but generally when bloggers fake comments, the comments would be short, unless only one or two comments are faked.

So once readers recognize that comments are faked, what will they think of you?

• You do not have a large amount of comments; thus faking them
• You want more comments
• You want to look good
• You are “evil” and probably have done other dishonest things for your blog in the past
• You have too much time on your hands
• You cannot manage your time well enough, and depending on your blog topic, will make you loose readers
• You cannot think sensibly

These are just some of the points that readers will think of you once they find out you are faking comments.
In Part II of Fake Comments, I will be discussing what you should do if you have faked comments in the past, what you should do in the future, what you should do to gain comments, and various other topics and questions related to Fake Comments.
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Comment posted by Emsz
at 6/17/2007 3:51:29 AM

I have never faked a comment fortunately
But I see the point You really shouldn’t do it, véry childish xD

Comment posted by Aaron Cook
at 6/17/2007 1:27:49 AM

Ha ha, that was a good one Angie.

Comment posted by Grace
at 6/16/2007 11:34:27 AM

Oh yes. You have a great point.

Comment posted by Angie Hartford
at 6/16/2007 10:58:12 AM

(channeling Elvis)
Thank you. Thankyouverramuch.

Comment posted by Brown Baron
at 6/16/2007 3:11:06 AM

I think Angie hit a bullseye there haha

Comment posted by Angie Hartford
at 6/15/2007 8:04:15 PM

Fake comments are kind of like voting for yourself in order to win the Miss Congeniality award in the Miss America Pageant.

Comment posted by Aaron Cook
at 6/14/2007 11:29:19 PM

Nice post. Problogger had a post about this recently too. And believe it or not, he admitted to actually posting fake comments on his blog when he was first starting out.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/06/13/should-i-add-fake-comments-to-my-blog/

Shine on,
Aaron

Comment posted by teddY
at 6/14/2007 9:26:11 PM

Hmm well sometimes when I get no comments for a post I’ve spent a lot of effort writing I got tempted to write fake comments so as to attract others to leave comments. But I’ve never done it before because thinking twicee about it, leaving fake comments is just meaningless. You can deceive yourself that someone actually left a comment but then you can’t hide from others - because the writing style is almost identical, unless you’re really good at impersonating others’ styles.

I completely agree with what Brown Baron said: “…just keep writing. The comments will come eventually.”

Comment posted by Grace
at 6/14/2007 9:25:11 PM

True. But if you kept on writing without doing anything, then you would still get the same amount of comments. People don’t usually comment on a post with 0-1 comments. Usually 2+.

Comment posted by Brown Baron
at 6/14/2007 8:47:40 PM

I think the best advice for that would be to just keep writing. The comments will come eventually.

Comment posted by Morriconei
at 6/19/2007 12:36:31 PM

I’ve never considered doing that. Although, I haven’t had a problem with no comments for a while.

Comment posted by Fake Comments I.V- Responses » NeonScent
at 6/19/2007 10:46:11 AM

[…] got a lot of responses for Fake Comments Part I, and I want to share some with you. I’ve picked some of the interesting or more insightful […]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007| Category: Blog and Design Tips, Blogging Tips, Writing | Comment | Trackback