First, if you don’t have a gravatar already, please go to gravatar.com and get one. It takes all of five minutes.Now, let’s move on. How many comments are left on your site daily that don’t have a gravatar? I would say that no matter who you are, somewhere around 30-60% is pretty common. Sure, if you want to be a faceless commenter with no identity, or brand for that matter, go for it. Get lost in the crowd of milllions in the blog community and quicly fade into cyber-obscurity.
Of course, faces are my preference but I’d take a cartoon of yourself, your company logo, and even your pet rock. Aside from the reason I stated above about having an identity, there are also a plethora of other reasons why you need to get a gravatar. That said, those are not what this article is about.
The reason why I want you to have a gravatar is because I want to save myself time — I’m averaging about 200 spam comments a day. I know, it’s my own fault for having dofollow, comment luv, a half decent PR, blah, blah, blah. I still go through every single spam comment just to see if there are false positives. That ends up being about 3-5 per day. Essentially, Akismet does its job.
But guess what, my time is more limited than ever and if you don’t have a gravatar, I’m not approving your comment. That’s because I won’t even see it. I’m no longer going to glance at anything in my spam folder other than comments with a gravatar. So instead of a few minutes to review my spam, it should take me a few seconds. If I happen to lose a few legit comments along the way, I’m willing to deal with that.
I believe most bloggers who graduate to the number of daily spam comments that I get do the same thing. So if you don’t want your comment to get lost, one that you spent time thinking about and writing, go get a gravatar now. Even if it saves one comment, you’re investment was worth its while.