Let’s start by acknowledging that this is a controversial topic. If you are a social media purist or a blogger who genuinely believes your material is so spectacular that nobody should ever drop a blog comment except to react to the profundity of your writing, then please close your eyes while you read the rest of this post.
There is a legitimate role for blog commenting in SEO, and this should not be confused with blog comment spam. We all hate spam. But we each person defines spam differently. Hopefully by the end of this post, you’ll know how to use blog commenting for SEO benefits without being a spammer.
SEO Benefits Of Blog Comments
There are a number of SEO benefits from blog commenting.
The most obvious is that the search engines read the links in your comment (normally your anme is hyperlinked to your website) and you build your link popularity directly from the comments. However, most blogs are NoFollow, which at least in theory means that they carry no link value. But there are also a fair number of DoFollow blogs, and some give you a hyperlink both in your name and at the end of the comment to your most recent blog post.
All other things being equal, you might as well search for DoFollow blogs with the CommentLuv plugin; if you spend your time making intelligent comments, you might as well get link value for it. That being said, I never hesitate to leave comments at a blog whether it is DoFollow or not. Link value is something, but it’s not everything….and I’m not so sure the search engines totally ignore NoFollow links, either.
Another SEO benefit from blog comments is that every time you leave a comment, the blog owner takes notice of you. This is especially true for repeat visitors, so it is worth returning to the same blogs over and over. The other bloggers will undoubtedly visit your website. If there is anything of value on your website (remember that content is king) they will link to you in a post or they will invite you as a guest blogger (usually with a link back) or you can offer to be a guest blogger (with a link back). Yes, linking is in fact about building relationships.
It’s not just the blogger who will read your comments and follow the links to your website; other commenters will, as will other readers (another reason it is crucial to leave comments of value). For this reason there are two types of blogs you want to seek out:
- Blogs on the topic of your own website.
- Blogs that your target market read (even if the topic is not totally related to your website).
- Blogs on topics of interest to you.
What’s that? Those are three types of blogs? Well, so they are. I never was good with numbers.
Yes, you should also frequent blogs that interest you, even if they are totally off-topic. I suspect I might be the only SEO consultant making this recommendation, but I think it is worth noting that if you are a hiker, you will have more intelligent comments to offer on a hiking blog – and you will enjoy doing it, so it will be less like work and more like fun. And whether the links are all keyword relevant, they still count and you’ll enjoy it a lot more than trolling for blogs only on your professional topic. So there!
Intelligent SEO
Have you noticed a common thread to all the advice above. Comment intelligently. As long as you are adding to the discussion, the blogger will appreciate your contribution. If you just write “Nice post”, expect to be deleted from any worthwhile blog. If somebody leaves a comment that could just as easily be left on any other of my posts, I mark it spam (see image below for the types of comments I wipe off with a little pesticide every morning).
But that’s just me.
Remember how I said that spam has different meanings to different people? Some bloggers will consider it spam if you drop a keyword into your name. While I do accept comments that come from “SEO Ottawa”, for example, I prefer ones that come from “David Leonhardt SEO” or just “David Leonhardt”. The contribution has to be better for me to approve a comment that doesn’t have a real name in it.
But that’s just me.
Never mind me. Before commenting, take a look at what other comments have been approved and make sure you conform to the convention of the blog (just as you would look around how other people act at a wine and cheese or a church basement gathering). Then make sure you exceed what you see, as a new contributor, both in quality of your comment and in avoiding a spammy signature link that might get your comment deleted if the blogger is having a grumpy day.
It is also worth returning to posts you have commented on. If someone has responded to your comment, it might be worth your while to respond back. The blog owner will love you for it, because you are creating interaction on her blog. Plus, any comment worth debating or discussing attracts more attention.
It’s worthwhile dropping a really relevant and useful link in your comment, if it provides truly useful information to better appreciate the blog post. Otherwise, I recommend against it. Gratuitous link-dropping is considered spamming pretty much anywhere.
If your site is adult-oriented or fits into one of the other red-flag categories, don’t even bother commenting (with a link) on most blogs. The blogger will not appreciate it and your comment will be deleted. You’ll need to find really related blogs that will accept your links.
But David, why shouldn’t I spam? What about a robot that auto-posts comments to save time (and having to use my brain cells)? Well, there is no denying that you can build some links that way. There are some lazy blog owners who don’t moderate their comments and let them publish automatically. There are four reasons why this really is not worth your while:
- Pretty much any non-moderated blog offers only NoFollow links
- Pretty much any non-moderated blog is considered low-quality and low-trust by the search engines
- Some non-moderated blogs do get cleaned out every now and then, and the spammers get reported
- The search engines might even be able to detect a pattern, and if most of your links come from sites known to link to spam websites, your website could be flagged as untrustworthy – guilt by association.
If I was to sum up everything here, it come down to this; when you are on somebody else’s blog, you have a wonderful opportunity to build relationships. In the online world, relationships means links, and SEO is all about building the right kind of links (well, not quite “all” about).
But just like in the real world, when you are on someone else’s space, pay very careful attention to what is accepted and what is not. The real definition of a spammer is somebody who does something that is not accepted. Period.
Commenting on blog posts in a manner accepted by the blog owner can be an effective means of attracting good quality links to your website and help with your overall SEO efforts.
David Leonhardt is president of The Happy Guy Marketing, a creative website marketing company that focuses on SEO and viral marketing to make websites better known among their target markets. David can be found on his SEO consultant website and other blog posts of his can be found on his SEO and marketing blog.
I have a Question. Suppose that you leave a comment on a no fallow blog but the comment does link to your website. Lets say you are just trying to be found by the search engines, do the web crawlers still fallow the link even though its a no fallow? and would this cause your website to begin getting indexed?
This is a tricky one. Personally I think that (for Google at least) the answer is no – they ignore the link altogether.
Essentially the nofollow is a webmasters way of saying “ignore this link, follow my other links instead”. Google won’t always follow every link on a site. If it follows a nofollow link, that might mean that a dofollow link gets ignored on that crawl.
.-= alex johnson recently posted: set up ebay business =-.
Excellent post David and I agree with you on every point. One thing that I think is worth mentioning is that when it comes to CommentLuv then that will not provide you with any link value if you’re using Feedburner for your RSS feeds as that link will then point to Feedburner and not your site. You’ll still get the visitors though.
Personally I am mostly commenting on do-follow blogs within my niche as well as the top blogs within the niche even though it is no-followed. I do that purely for the building of a relationship as well as to get additional traffic from that blogs regular readers.
/Mikael
Cool post man, I always wondered what difference nofollow made. But do you think I can get more comments on my blog if I make the comments dofollow and write a post about it?
Not sure about it because some people might put links to bad websites and Google will just put my thingys down lol.
Well one way I have seen blog administrators deal with this issue is requiring a certain amount of post before the no fallow is removed. That way only serious people will take the time to post.. Do you check your post before you approve them? I know that could be time consuming.. You could have people register before they post, then check their website before approval..
Good post and I certainly agree that the comment that you post must create an interaction. But I always wonder how effective will this useful for a corporate B2B website. Do I have to post my name or the company name. Some times a controversial comment would lead to negative reputation and I would prefer choosing my name instead. I would like to add that blog commenting should express your views on the post rather than any irrelevant stuff that markets the website/your service.
Honestly, I found your blog while looking for dofollow blogs to comment on, but now that this post is about blog commenting and you made it quite clear what you dont want to see as comments, I better make an effort 🙂 Anyway I just wanted to add that I have been blog commenting for the last 2-3 weeks, and have seen very good results from good already.
I’m still affraid that those comments don’t seem sincere. I mean people know that you didn’t visit their site just for its content.
“Pretty much any non-moderated blog is considered low-quality and low-trust by the search engines”… I don’t know about that one. Think you are over-generalizing that statement.
Hi David
I don’t normally post on ‘no follow’ blogs, why? Because I am normally doing what this article is about, looking for links from blogs. In fact, I came to this blog looking for a free link to my website, but unfortunately, it’s a ‘no follow’ blog. You say you are not sure if search engines take notice of ‘no follow’ but given there are enough ‘do follow’ blogs out there to comment on, I tend not to bother with them. However, this article is an exeption because I really want to say something about this post and my experience doing what you suggest.
I have been blogging for 2 or 3 weeks now doing as you suggest. I haven’t been spamming the blog and have made sure I am able to contribute something meaningful to the conversation. However, I find that there are a high percentage of ‘do follow’ blog owners that are over protective of their blogs and they just remove anything with a link in. I have contributed some, what I consider, really useful info opinions/info to blogs which have sometimes taken me 20 to 30 minutes to type, just for it to be trashed as spam. Now it’s not the fact that I didn’t get the link that upsets me, it’s the fact that my contribution with a lot of thought (albeit to get a link) has been trashed.
Earlier today for the first time, I noticed a comment I posted on a blog that had the link removed. Now that, I totally respect the guy for. He didn’t just trash my work, he removed the link but that I don’t mind. The link is a bonus.
So I just wish blog owners would just remove links rather than the whole post all together. It’s just as disrespectful as spamming!
Sorry this post is so long and hopefully, it won’t get trashed!
Regards
Lee
Hi David,
You did a great job as you described SEO benefits of Blog Commenting smoothly. Probably search engine don’t follow the “nofollow” links in blog, but you will get a good amount of traffics though the blog posting if you blog comment will be interesting and informative. So whenever you write blog comments for any blog post, try to make it more informative.
>most blogs are NoFollow, which at least in theory means that they carry no link value
This is a common believe. I’ve tried to get to it’s origin by reading Mutt Cutt’s and other Googlers posts. It seems that nofollow is an equivalent of 2 statements:
-I don’t want to spill my link juice on that site
-I have no opinion about content at that site
Nobody says that Google will ignore the link. So, as you said, post everywhere and on topic.
I have about 40 blogs that I follow and comment one, yours being one of them. About half of them are “do follow” and I appreciate getting link love. I have gotten a lot form the other blogs as well, like traffic and credibility and exposure. In fact, I have been asked to guest post on 2 authority blogs based on my comments.
I think blog commenting is its own reward — you’re contributing to the overall quality of the web and you’re helping out the host blogger. However, I find that so many comment author links lead to commercial sites (borderline spam or flat-out spam), that they’re usually not worth clicking. At least half of the comments I moderate have some commercial motivation, even if the comment is decent. For my own projects, I believe the time is better spent on Digg and the like. But still, I comment.
I also highly dislike comments that are left that just simply say “nice post”, its amazing how many people leave these types of comments. I wonder if they are automatic by a bot? Or if it is a real human that is actually going around and just posting that? Surely after their comments get deleted most of the time they would learn a lesson?
Anyways, I think blog commenting is a great thing, and I most definitely would encourage everyone to do it.
On one note… you said “The search engines might even be able to detect a pattern, and if most of your links come from sites known to link to spam websites, your website could be flagged as untrustworthy – guilt by association.”
Heres my take on that…. if that were true… wouldn’t it then be easy to take down a competitor by placing ALOT of links to them from bad neighbor hoods? So I would think that as long as you dont link out to the bad neighborhood then you are ok?
Hi,
Great article, totally agree with you that search engines do give some type of value to nofollow links. You might not get any PR transfered over but your SERPs will still increase.
The “nofollow” tells a search engine to stop passing on ranking to the website. It does not tell the search engine not to follow the website all together. There is a big difference.
So although nofollow has less SEO value, it is still useful for indexing purposes.
Don’t forget, if a person follows your link, and then adds your website to their website/blog. Then it is just as effective as it it were a followed link originally!
Great article, very informative. Do you feel blog commenting is the twitter of SEO? Or are more conventional methods still viable as well?
This is really interesting! I have been thinking about the value of commenting on blogs which are unrelated to my sites but are on subjects that I find interesting. I haven’t done so yet, but I may just have to start as an experiment. I’ve been blog commenting for some time now, on industry specific blogs, which is great as I’ve learned so much from doing so. I would highly recommend it for that reason alone!
but there’s still many blogs that are dofollow.
I also use it for seo. But I try to give comment by read the post, so my comments are related to topics. And I don’t like one liner comment, it’s like spam.
Hi David,
I subscribe to Yahoo search, which is how I wound up here and ended up subscribing to your blog. Thanks for this post. I will now incorporate blog commenting on sites that don’t relate to mine, but have specific interest to me.
@Lee, I had the same experience having a comment rejected as spam at a dofollow blog the other day. They do seem to be on edge, those dofollow bloggers. What upsets me is the energy I spent reading the post, comments and trying to make a contribution. Out of principle, I never drop useless comments — I make it a point to engage in the discussion. The kicker — he/she managed to approve a bunch of one liners like “thanks, great post” instead of mine.