The difference between an SEO who has tested commenting on blogs and one who hasn’t is that the one who hasn’t says it doesn’t work and the one who has keeps quiets about it and keeps commenting.
As an SEO it also marks you out as to whether they are in the Premier League or still slugging it out for the pub team.
Some SEO “experts” will see say, “nofollow”, doesn’t pass juice. End of.
This is a mistake.
A blog comment is an advert, it is a branding tool, it will add to the sum of how people perceive you. How people perceive you has a direct impact on whether they will link to you.
For example, when SEO “experts” say blog commenting is useless, my perception of their skill as an SEO is further informed.
It’s well known that blogs and their comments get scraped and nofollow removed.
A visible link means that a human can visit the site and drop a dofollow if they like what they see.
Blog owners tend to check out the links left in the blog comments, which means you can get very important bloggers to come to your site.
A blog comment can demonstrate your skill in an area and make people go, “ooohhhhhh, she’s good.”
If blog spamming did not work, do you really think it would still be happening? What’s interesting about the nofollow that was introduced to blogs to stop spamming is that it hasn’t done anything to stop it.
Also, even when the link was dofollow and SEO’s would look at a blog and say, “but it’s not a real website”
Does this mean that you should go out and leave “Great post”, in the comments of as many blogs as you can find. No, because there is a way to blog comment and there is a way to not.
Blog commenting is a tool in the tool box, brought out for specific tasks and for specific reasons. I’m not not going to give you a step by step guide of how to do it as you probably have a massive brain (you’re reading this blog) and have worked it out on your own by now.
However, I am always willing to listen to the other side of the argument and so if you have data on to show that blog commenting is useless I would love to hear it.
One of the problems of course is that it can be really boring if you hae no opinion and that outsourcing it can lower the quality.
It’s tricky, which means if you hit the sweet spot there are few others creaming it.
Lyndon I like this and the angle you take on the article!
Blog commenting is worth small amounts of time, again it is one of those time vs value arguments. Blog commenting is not useless IMHO. Get 100 SEO’s in a room and I think they would be split into 3.
Outsourcing or automated is worth it if it can create a relevant comment and not going to be considered s.p.a.m.
Great post! lol I am in complete agreement & always trying to sell my clients on the fact that commenting works for SEO – and for marketing and “branding” in general – for the reasons you state. Sad that I have to “sell” truths that are clearly beneficial to their businesses.
Yahoo! Site Explorer prominently displays inbound links from comments on authoritative blogs whether they are nofollow or not. And, as you note, “If blog spamming did not work, do you really think it would still be happening?” Right. QED
Its funny – I was just asking this question to one of our SEO experts yesterday. We basically came up with the same conclusion.
And as you said – if it didn’t work, people would stop doing it. (Same with email SPAM).
Thanks,
tom
Personally, I always comment on a blog post if I find value in what has been said.
The dofollow / nofollow thing is just the biggest seo mis-direct of all time. Any backlink is a good backlink. And if it’s come from an interesting article, one that we want to be associated with liking, more to the better.
And now Google is taking notice of Facebook likes and comments, so I give a little link juice love there too.
Spot on! You’re talking about 2 things that work together: SEO rankings in SE’s & traffic traffic from links/comments. Sure, blog comments & link building may/may not help increase your organic ranking in Google, but if the link drives targeted traffic to your site – it’s a winner! SEO tasks don’t have to raise rankings, they just need to drive traffic that converts… without spamming, of course : )
Aside from link value – people also forget how much traffic a well placed comment on a big blog can send. I have one site that gets high XXXX visits/year from one blog comment.
I have been in the SEO space for over 10 years, with heavy link building emphasis for the past 5 years. I agree that blog commenting is a valuable form of link building, especially when it is integrated with other content-driven linking efforts; thus, the sum of all parts drives SEO value. Doing blog commenting on a consistent basis is also something that should happen. The SEO that is 100% focused on keyword-based anchor text for only dofollow links just does not get it & will likely get their clients a BLOOP (Back Link Over Optimization Penalty) sooner than later — I’ve seen it before — blog commenting actually augments hyper-SEO linking & serves as ‘air cover’ in the process. Also, with everyone obsessing over the social graph & its SEO value — I believe those who have been anti-blog commenting will change their tune b/c after all, an active blog/post/discussion is a conversation. Those participating in discussions (such as this one), be it in a blog, twitter, FB, linkedin, etc — are the ones gaining benefit from those signals; SEO value is gained, industry-specific exposure is gained, branding is gained & possible traffic is gained. All in all, I find blog commenting to be a worthwhile exercise when targeting the right blogs, right topics & right audience that is relevant to your business/industry.
You’re absolutely right. If it didn’t work, people would stop doing that long time ago. And they didn’t! I’m mad, when in niche and not popular blog I have to delete about 20-30 spammy coments a week.
I do it because it’s fun! Okay I do it because I like the content and find it interesting. I love it when I get comments back, ohh.. social networking. And, it is fun! What ever the reason or strength of Goggle’s SEOs, leaving comments on blogs is to let the blogger know they are not alone in cyberspace and maybe they have triggered a reaction in another human being whether good or bad, but definitely a connection has been made. Let Goggle pick up on that one 🙂
Yeah this make sense that if it was not working people would have stop doing it! but i would gonna say this does not pass any link juice why people are actually commenting on the blogs is to catch the humans attention. When you comment on the blogs with lot of traffic what usually happen is the blog starts to drive traffic to your website. but as far as link juice i don’t agree no follow links on commenting does not pass any link juice at all.
Blog commenting is a great SEO tool, if done properly (like all of them really). I’ve seen a lot of sites who rank pretty much on the strength of their blog commenting. Its also a great thing your clients can get involved in as well, a lot will probably be commenting on relevant sites already you just need to remind them to put links in as well.
Probably best to stick to doing it manually though, I have seen some occassions where using automated tools to do it can do more harm than good. It is possible to get sites to rank well for pretty competitive terms doing nothing but comment spamming but at the same time I know someone who got one of their personal sites banned (deliberately) by Google by going over the top with it.
We wrote about this same topic. You may find this useful as well. Our post is more to reaffirm the whole reason blogging and social media should be used for positive and constructive means rather than a means to rank. Please give it a read if you feel inclined.
http://www.blackballonline.com/wordpress/blogging/pittsburgh-seo-etiquette-blog-commenting/
“The difference between an SEO who has tested commenting on blogs and one who hasn’t is that the one who hasn’t says it doesn’t work and the one who has keeps quiets about it and keeps commenting.”
..so true, but doesn’t this apply to so many borderline SEO techniques? as you say, if spamming didn’t work the bots wouldn’t be running 24 hours a day doing it, would they? forums are so full of “experts” espousing what they’ve been told by someone else as fact, with no actual personal experience of the matter, it’s a joke.
IMO there’s far too much regurgitation in SEO in general, and not nearly enough actually testing it to see what happens.
Blog commenting could be used strictly for SEO or for a complete strategy of brand awareness, traffic and all that stuff. I agree that the benefits of blog comments are much better than the link itself, but people that do it strictly for SEO are trying to evaluate to ROI of the strategy without considering the other benefits and I think that this is valid form of metric.
I think that doing it strictly for SEO is not worth it any more.
Blog Commenting is useful only if we had dofollow link as well as link from good PR site, i think blog commenting doesn’t help us in gaining traffic on our site, but still it useful from backlink point of view!!!
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To be honest. I have closed one of my blogs. It was attracting thousands of commentators. I really dont know where they was coming from. Now I know that it is used as an SEO strategy.
Here are my views on why I thin that blog commenting is useless:
1) Interest grabbing comments in blogs that allow inserting links within the comment body or in the author profile lead to clicks to your site. However in order for this to work from an SEO standpoint, a visitor that discovers your site via a link in a blog comment: A) has to appreciate the blog/site enough to deem it worthy of link; and B) has to have the capacity or authority to upload hyperlinks. At least in my experience, this does not happen very often.
2) I did not test the results of commenting on do-follow blogs. The results may have been different if I had hunted for do-follow blogs, which do not include the no-follow tag that is specifically designed to signal to the search engines not to pass on link authority. My blog commenting was limited to interesting articles to which I could add meaningfully to the thread. I really truly was attempting to add value, not just testing out a tactic for manufacturing link authority .
3) Google indexes blog comments. So your blog comments may turn up in response to search queries, but only with links to your comment and the site where you posted the comment. No link authority is passed on to your own site.
An ephemeral benefit of blog commenting is that it can lead to impressive looking results on Yahoo Site Explorer. If I was duplicitously trying to impress a client with all my activity on their behalf, one look at the stats would demonstrate that I had been busy. As shown below, I have generated 119 in links to Internet Marketing Remarks according to Yahoo Site Explorer.
As an owner of a small business we understand the importance of raising awareness of our business to others but when it comes to online promotion it seems the search engines are always changing the way in which it determines how to rank natural listings. With thousands of SEO companies out there all with differing opinions on what tactics to use to gain more web traffic and page rank juice us meer mortals do not know who to entrust to boost our online presence and beat our competitors!
We now refrain from using an SEO company as wefound that whilst the tactics employed did give results it was completely unnatural and often links came from spurious websites.
Blogging and blog commenting we feel are great tools for getting traffic directed to your website, it just makes more sense than any other form of link building! As Lyndon Antcliff says its an advert of perception about you and about your business. If you are adding well constructed argument to the conversation of a blog, people will take notice and you are likely to gain interest and traffic. Guest blogging on other websites allows you to showcase your expertise.
Adversely if your comments are just to gain a link and don’t bring anything to the table they are going to be transpamment!! and people just won’t click to view your site.
I think as long as you give honest comments and not just “cool blog” things, blog commenting can be effective and if you get only 1-2 visitors/month from a blogpost. It still worth it.
Hello,
You’re absolutely right. If it didn’t work, people would stop doing that long time ago but they didn’t! Blog commenting is a great SEO tool, if done properly.
I believe the only way anyone can benefit from blog comments are if they actually help the reader and is more of a marketing tactic than SEO.
I’m personally still confused about whether nofollow links are valuable for seo. Some say they are others say they are not. I’ve also read that google expects sites to have a mixture of both kinds of inbound links.
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