I received an email from a visitor to my site the other day. He was from webhost4life.com and was responding to my post in where I praised his company.

I came across this post http://www.mattberther.com/?p=584 and I see many fake and unverifiable comments on it. In fact, I see many identical comments on many different blogs and forums. These are very likely to be competitor trying to hurt our reputation. If you check our testimonial page, you’ll see that we do get good feed back on a daily basis. I need your assistant in removing those comments.

Please let me know if you can help.

I figured that this would be as good a time as any to talk about my comment policy.

I will not delete any comment that add something to the conversations. The only comments that get deleted are those which are obviously spam. I believe very strongly in freedom of speech, even speech which I disagree with.

I think it’s important to hear from everyone, not just those which I, or my readers, agree with.

To address this particular concern, I will say only that there are an equal number of praises in the comments of that post. It’s very important for people researching a product or service to hear unbiased feedback. If I buy something and want to do research online for that, I fully expect to see both positive and negative reviews. If I cant get an unbiased view of the product or service, I do not have everything I need to make an informed decision.