We love nothing more than reading your comments — you bring added knowledge to the community here, offer helpful links and are generally always so encouraging.

Unfortunately at times comments on SC aren’t in line with our values — harsh, irrelevant or simply spam.

Coming from a social media background where setting up and moderating communities was Gina’s daily role, she knows how important it is to have clear and transparent community guidelines so we’ve created this short comment policy.

Please take a few minutes to familiarise yourself with these common sense rules that are simply aimed at keeping SC a friendly and relevant blog for us all to enjoy.

1. Comments are encouraged — we know it can be intimidating to comment on a blog but like we said above we LOVE comments and want you to feel like you can ask any question, share your thoughts or offer your tips. We just ask that comments are on topic, won’t offend others or aren’t simply promotional.

2. Spam is deleted — spam filters automatically catch most spam comments on our site but if some do slip through, they will be deleted immediately. They don’t add value and detract from the actual conversations going on.

3. We actively encourage relevant links — if you’re leaving a comment and want to point to a link on your own or someone else’s site that is relevant to the topic then please feel free to do so. This adds to the conversation and improves the blog.

4. Irrelevant links are not encouraged — this ties back to the spam policy above. If you leave a comment with a link in it that has no relevance to the post you’re commenting on it will be deleted. If you want to boost your SEO, we suggest finding genuine interactions on sites where your links are relevant. Alternatively, we’d love to discuss partnership opportunities.

5. We allow signatures in comments — not all blogs allow signatures or a link back to the commenter’s site but if you leave a super helpful comment, chances are other readers will want to find out more about you which is why we think a signature adds value.

The last thing we want to do is impose unnecessary rules to restrict comments on our blog — but at the same time, we don’t want the value of comments on SC to be eroded by those who are simply trying to boost their own site’s SEO or are spammers.

Hopefully you can see the benefit in this short comment policy that we’ll refer people to when their comments are deleted or not published.

Team SC xx