Hiding Comments in Blogger

My very first step before disabling comments on my blogs was to set all existing comments to hidden meaning that they would not be shown so no link love coming from my blogs.  Now that comments are disabled I'm faced with the decision as to whether or not to delete any existing comments.  True they can't be seen by the reader and serve no purpose but any links in them are still seen by the search engine bots.  While deleting the existing comments may be the best thing I do for my PR I'm not sure I really want to just yet.  A month from now I may decide I want to allow comments again on one or more of my blogs so losing the existing comments would be a shame.  In the meantime they remain hidden while I decide exactly how I want to deal with comments on my blogs. 

To hide comments in Blogger go to your Blogger dashboard > settings > then toggle hide comment instead of show.  This does not delete the comments, merely hides them from being shown.  You can restore visibility at any time by simply toggling on 'show'.  Choosing the hide feature is a nice option for any blogger dealing with a lot of comment spam or wanting to see the effect of turning off comments entirely before doing so.  I can see this feature as being good comment spam control because spammers know right off the bat their link is not going to be shown, defeating the purpose of spamming in the first place.  One thing to consider though is as far as I know hidden comments will still affect your PR.  If this is a concern you will have to go through each comment removing any spammed link or delete the comments entirely.  I don't recommend deleting the comments because at some point you may want to display them.

Garden Gnome
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