Do you enable comments on your affiliate sites/blogs?

That is working smarter good tip.

I manually approve any comments, more often than not I will have the same old spam comments day after day, but occasionally you will get some great insightful questions or views.

What I would like to know is are those decent comments we receive beneficial to your rank?

Thanks,
Ste.

It probably depends on two main things:

1.)How much monitoring you want to do of the comments that are made, and
2.)What kind of surfing experience (or website service) you're ultimately trying to provide.

If you have 100's of blogs or websites, and their only purpose is to re-direct the viewer as quickly as possible to clicking on an advertisement or affiliate link, then enabling comments may not be worth your time and effort.

However, I've also heard that with as far as Web 2.0 Marketing goes, the emphasis is on interaction, evaluation, and feedback, and that these things add value to your website according to the search engines. (I read about this theory in Tiffany Dow's report, "The Multi-Layered Mindset of Web 2.0 Marketing," in case you want to read more about her take on all of this.) If that's the case, or if you have enough time to devote to it anyways, then you may want to consider enabling the comments feature so that you have a more interactive (and thereby, more valuble?) blog.

As far as spam goes, everyone has different ideas as to what exactly constitutes as spam, but usually non-spam comments are comments that add value. A comment like "This is really great, keep posting more stuff like this," is a little generic, but is still giving your post a positive review. If it seems redundant or unnecessary you could delete it, but that could also be seen as a small slap in the face to the person who had the intention of praising your blog in the first place.

If you do decide to enable comments, I'd definitely moderate them as much as possible, to eliminate completely pointless comments, people bashing the blog, or anything rude or offensive of course.

Once again, you know your intentions for your blog better than anyone else, so whatever you choose will be the best fit for what you're trying to achieve.

-Sarah

I've never enabled comments on any affiliate website I've ever had. It's never occurred to me to do so, and it still doesn't.

I don't think of them as "blogs".

They are, technically, blogs, because they're made from blogging software/CMS, and I have to turn off all the stuff that looks "bloggy" to conceal the fact. Nobody looking at them would ever know that there was/could have been/might have been a way to "comment". I even remove the "powered by TypePad" announcement at the bottom.

People who want to "comment" can go to a forum.