Natural Link Building Using Comments
Author: John | Filed under: Black Hat & SEO Spam, Grow Your Traffic, Link Building, Social Media Marketing
via flickr
I was asked by a friend today if posting comments on blogs with no follows is a good way to build links for SEO. When I asked him what other strategies he had for acquiring links he mentioned this was going to be primary source of link building!
Why link building using comments is on its way out?
Just like the good old days where keyword stuffing and meta tag stuff used to work quiet well, search engines and especially Google are now catching on to comment spamming.
Links in comments are now devalued regardless whether or not if they have no follows. This is a direct response to the huge amount of spam comments now appearing on blogs, if you have ever ran a blog of your own, you will know what I mean, even the most obscure, hard to find blogs on the strangest topics can attract spam comments.
Its actually not hard for search engines to determine if a link is from the comments section of a blog, a quick look at the code in wordpress.
<ol class=”commentlist”>
<li id=”comment-1372″>
<a id=”comments”>
Not hard for search engines to look for these tags and devalue the link-juice within them is it?
Don’t despair, comments are still useful
While comments are no longer useful for link-juice / reputation passing, they are still useful for the following reasons;
Driving qualified traffic
Lets say you own a fishing / lure store and you come across a blog post from someone complaining he isn’t catching any fish. This would be a perfect opportunity for you to leave a comment with fishing tips and suggest some lures he could use; at the end of the comment, be honest and say you own a fishing store where they purchase these products, with one link to your website, not ten!
You already have the target audience thanks to the blog post, now its simply putting together a well constructed comment.
Be mindful how you structure the reply, comments that look like a cut and paste job or advertising fluff will be deleted. Trust me, these type of comments are not hard to spot.
Ask yourself, are you providing any added value to the post, if a friend came to you with a complaint that he isn’t catching any fish. Are you going to give him a bunch of random lure names without telling him why he should use them? Of course not, be conversational. don’t write your comments like robots, because they will be treated like one.
Quicker Indexing
Comment links can also be used to get your website indexed quicker by search engines, if your website is new and not showing up in Google index; it is most likely in Google’s Sandbox.
A method I have found to be useful is using blog comments on popular blogs to naturally drive Googlebot to your sand boxed website.
Follow the advise above with comment structure and don’t spam. You will find once you have a few decent comments approved on blogs, it will move out of the sandbox faster, in most cases I have found this process to be faster than manually submitting your website to Google.
( Don’t forget to setup a Google webmasters account, if your sites not been found it could be other issues causing it, don’t assume its just been sandboxed, I will be posting about Google Webmaster Tool soon, stay tuned )
Making Connections
Blog commenting is one of the simplest form of Social Media Marketing! Good comments generate discussion, and this is what every blog owner wants. Subscribe to comment updates via email so you know when someone else has responded to your comment, this is where you can really engage with your target audience and offer your services / products.
Good comments can still land you juicy backlinks, most blog owners appreciate good comments and will reward you with a link from an actual post perhaps mentioning how your fishing lure has helped him catch more fish!
Not only do you get a backlink from an actual post which would pass on the link juice, you have just gained yourself a loyal customer that will potentially refer others to your website.
Closing thoughts on blog comments
So hopefully you will take my advice and stop comment spam once and for all on the internet!
But seriously, blog commenting is a great internet marketing tool, but for link building purposes they are clearly not as useful as they used to be. If you are solely focused on an SEO campaign, cross off blog comments please!
August 24th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Hi, I’m glad you found a use for my “Add Your Comment” photo. BTW – the link for your attribution is http://www.flickr.com/photos/dharmasphere/20993325/ – so that people can find the rest of my photos.
Cheers,
Prem
August 24th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
blog commenting is the most successful way of getting links,most of the people think that its unimportant or useless to comment on blogs having no follow tag, almost now all of the blogs have nofollow tag, but I would recomment to comment on follow blogs aswell, the link juice do pass and helps in getting good rankings.
August 25th, 2009 at 5:01 am
Thank you for a great article. I also think that blog commets are a good link building tactic. I’ve been doing some SEO for our company’s website and I used the directory submission, article submission and blog commenting most. But the truth is that finding good, relevant blogs to post comments on is a time consuming and tedious work.
August 25th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
yea it is a tedious job, but you can use some blog searching queries to find the most relevant and goog pr blogs.I follow the same tactic.
August 26th, 2009 at 4:22 am
Thanks for sharing the very good and great tips.Really Nice.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:11 am
@all Thank you for taking the time to comment.
@ Premasagar : Thanks for the heads up, original post did include your flickr URL, WP removed the link on the caption
@ SEO Pakistan : Yes, blog comments are still good as outlined in my post. But as the main source of backlink juice, no way. Not even close.
@ Julia – Blog Finder : Yes, but isn’t that half the fun of link building? Finding a website that you never knew existed that is related to your niche.
@ ALL – There is a thread in the link building forum that has some good info regarding linkbuilding using directories, you could apply the same to blogs.
http://forums.lilengine.com/showthread.php?t=60780
@ swasa – My pleasure, I hope the SEO tips came in handy.
August 31st, 2009 at 8:59 am
Sooo…now we have “blog comments” as not being useful for link building. Recriprocal linking is also on the way out….what is next article marketing or is that also taking a nose dive. It is getting harder and harder to get good rankings.
September 1st, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Whether a blog has nofollow tags or not, it can still generate traffic and that traffic may link. It doesn’t hurt to comment regardless. We are all in the same community (blogging) so why not comment on each others blogs?
I personally removed the nofollow tags on my blog. If a comment is spam I delete it. Thank the Blogging God for comment moderation!
September 2nd, 2009 at 12:24 am
@Paul – I agree mate, it is getting harder and harder to find good rankings, but just like everything. If its easy then everyone would be doing it. Which is exactly what is happening now within the industry, too many cowboys after a quick buck.
Paul, i’ve just checked out your blog. If you would l like to do a guest post for us pls give me a holler johnchen at lilengine.com.
@Mike – Yep, this was the point of my article. Comments should be used to build relationships and not for link spam. You will find commenting on blogs is an art in itself and very useful for internet marketing.
Mike, if you are interested in a guest post to expand more on your post on Evernote, please contact me. I’ve never used this service before, but it seems it could come in handy for marketing research etc.
I will have a follow up post on how comments can work effectively alongside your SEO campaign, with some neat stats to proove my point.
Thanks for the comments guys.
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:02 am
Hey johnchen of course I would love to do a guest post. Tell me what, where and when?
Paul
September 15th, 2009 at 9:09 am
I disagree, is important what the BFU’s are using as search engin. No everywhere is so important google, if you know what i mean. So if I can say, I reccomend use the comment.
September 19th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Great article. Yes blog commenting is still important, thank god the old techniques have not gone away. Perhaprs we’re all gonna grow old and say ‘Those old good SEO techniques have never really dies have they’
October 4th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Well written article. Thanks a lot telling link building via comments still usefull.
I hav commented a lot and got good results.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:50 am
nice article. i have red your article. you have made some good points.i have learned so much from your post. thanks for sharing good info.
regards,
October 30th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Great post. I totally agree with you.