Hi Dan,

I’m speaking from a biased point of view, but comments are crucial for building site popularity. If you turn them off, readers will think you don’t care about them. Also, I’ve found that by conversing with readers through comments on both their blogs and my blog, I gradually built relationships with them, and in turn we naturally linked to each other when we found something interesting on each others’ blogs.

Very interesting article, thanks for the good read =)

PS: I’ve found that with Feedburner, the more subscribers I got, the less hits and comments I’ve received. It’s a fact of the ‘1 million feed subscriptions’ Internet life, I guess

What’s it worth to you?

That’s the question you need to ask yourself. If your comments become uncontrollable, I would say that they are not having much impact and will probably degrade the performance and impact of your site. I love reading comments and want to show visitors that I’m approachable.

Also, many of the readers that I have don’t have blogs, so trackbacks aren’t an option for them.

Regards,
Doug

“If someone wants to write a blog post instead of leaving a comment he or she is anyway going to do that because bloggers are always looking for opportunities for creating blog posts. Comments enable even those visitors to express themselves who don’t maintain blogs.”

That’s a very good point Amrit, and perhaps getting those with out blogs involved in the conversation may lead to them becoming bloggers themselves.