These days, more and more bloggers are adopting blog commenting for SEO benefits.
Most of them even included blog commenting as their main link building strategy. A dangerous trait, for sure.
If you are commenting excessively on other blogs, only for SEO purposes, then you are not only wasting your time, but also asking Google to take action against your blog, in future.
Do not get me wrong. I also comment a lot on other blogs, constructively, and with good intention.
Pros of Blog Commenting
1. Sense of pride: When you leave a constructive comment on a blog, by adding value to the blog post, how do you feel?
Blog comments are actually mini articles or sub articles, or simply the extensions of main article. And, adding one, usually gives a Sense of Pride.
2. Publicity: When you comments on popular and high traffic blogs, lots of other commenting bloggers from your niche notice you.
They know you and about your blog. It’s just like a mini promotion of yourself and your blog.
3. Traffic: By leaving comments on busy blogs, you get new or unique visitors or traffic. They may consider subscribing your blog, after reading few blog posts.
4. Relationship: Commenting on a blog develops inter-personal relationship with the author, and sometimes with the admin.
They might consider linking your blog posts in future, as references.
Cons of Blog Commenting
1. Nil SEO value: Most of the blogging platforms or CMS have NoFollow attribute for their commenting system.
You are not going to get any link-juice from you comment backlinks.
2. Waste of time: Do you know – 20 Constructive Comments = 1 Unique and Quality Blog Post.
If you are addicted to blog commenting, then you are losing your precious time, which, you should have utilized to write a new blog post.
3. Comment Spam or Link spam: Now comes the dreaded thing !
In recent SES Sanfrancisco 2012 (day 2), Matt Cutts has categorically mentioned about the comment spam, while addressing Penguin algorithm and other SEO related queries.
The way he kicked few leading blogging networks (Spammy activities) in recent past, might consider adding comment spam as a signal in Penguin Algorithm.
Final words: Google crawls, indexes and ranks blog comments.
The keywords contributed by other bloggers or blog commenters help your blog post rank higher in search engines.
A blog without comments is like “a woman without ornaments.”
About Nandita B.
My name is Nandita B, and I’m a SEO practitioner and part-time blogger. My sheer passion for sharing knowledge a webmaster needs drove me to create “A Webmaster’s Magazine” called SEOHour.com
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Is that really true, but on many blogs and sites we generally see that the most you comment more you get the traffic. acc. to you this is not true, right ??
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I think you haven’t read the post sincerely.
Traffic generation is one of the main advantage of blog commenting, that I have mentioned above.
But blog commenting for SEO benefit is foolishness.
hi Nan!
I love your blog, and this is another post that explains why. I had thought that the commenting was a waste of time (for SEO) for ages, but I’m glad you spelt it out, and why. I’m also glad you pointed out all the advantages of commenting for those of us who actually do breathe, and have a brain, so people DO comment when appropriate.
Keep up the good work luv!
Kate
Hi Kate,
Thanks for the appreciation and liking my blog.
BTW, you have a good collection of VIDEOS on your blog MyOnlineTip.com
Useful inputs, Nandita!
Have been a regular blogger for the last 8+ months I have seen the benefits that accrue from doing what you have suggested.
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Hi Jayadev,
Everything has its PROS and CONS, so also the Blog Commenting. So, why not leverage the good ones.
Nice to see you on MoneyCTL.
Thanks.
I totally agree with “3. Traffic: By leaving comments on busy blogs, you get new or unique visitors or traffic. They may consider subscribing your blog, after reading few blog posts.”
I have seen this method work so many time, it is just very time consuming – so you really must have some purpose when implementing it.
tom altman recently posted…SEO Test: Google doesn’t care about Keywords in the Meta Description
Hi Tom,
It’s an honor for me to have your comments (Thoughts) on my blog (MoneyCTL).
Thanks.
Nandita B.
Hi Nandita,
Yes, I agree, there is a sense of pride in being able to add value to a blog post. I love it when I am able to take away something I learned from another commenter.
It would be to our advantage if we take the time to leave insightful comments. Others will view us as an authority and may be interested enough to visit our blogs thus increasing traffic to our site.
You’re right, we can also develop a meaningful relationship with the blog owner and might even be invited as a guest blogger.
These are all great benefits and it would really be a shame if we only use blog commenting for SEO purposes and not maximize its full potential.
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Nice article. Would appreciate you to review my blog.
Dhruva Pathak recently posted…Mutual Funds under Rajiv Gandhi Equity Scheme?
I was thinking to add comment here or not but I have to, it is really good message for all bloggers. Very informative. Thanks
I rarely comment ,I’m bit lazy as far as commenting aspect is concerned.Now onwards, I will add comments which ever blog I visit.
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I have often wondered how useful blog commenting is to a persons overall seo strategy. A while back I spent a lot of time commenting on other peoples blog always trying to add value.
What I noticed though was I was spending upwards to 45 minutes sometimes on just 1 comment.
While from time to time I do blog comment, like I am now I found a better use of my time is creating new and exciting content for my readers to eat up.
You actually bring up a lot of valid points which is what prompted me to comment here in the first place.
…More Than Anything Though:
I think I like the relationship building with other bloggers part. I totally agree with your 4th point. I have gotten some really good guest post because of leaving good comments.
Thanks for sharing…
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Hello again Nandita. As usual great post. I completly agrees to your #3, but for the rest seo part, I think I will say NOOOO…..o
Why? is here :
I want you to go to aherfs.com ( not my site 0, type in your domain name and see the backlinks. The domain name http://moneyctl.com have more than 4500 backlinks and in those less than 20 percent are dofollow and rest are nofollow.
I would just like to mention about the natural link building. Its a request, that you should read few of the posts on natural link building.
If you wish you may refer to this post : http://blogvkp.com/effective-link-building-methods-for-better-seo/
A link with nofollow will also work if it comes from any authoritative sites.
BLOGVKP recently posted…Seo For Bing : Tips To Rank Higher
Your blog is informative and I now scared to comment anybody after studying this post. Nearly I would read a minimum of 10blogs a day in that I would comment atleast 5..What shall I do from today. In SEO mpart kindly suggest me..And please tell me Indias top financial blog websites.
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Matt Cutts was saying with the comment spam issue, that the update would effect the actual sites with all the comment spam on it, and not the actual sites that, that site is linking too.
Which makes sense, because if they did go down that path, then virtually EVERY single site in their index would be penalised, not to mention, how easy it would be to take your competitors website down.
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I do blog hopping because I love to surf the internet and learn a couple of lessons on topics concerning blogging. When I find the blog content helpful, I leave my comment to thank the author or to share my thoughts. I was unaware before of the link juice or traffic we can get from blog commenting but now I know. Most comment forms today are nofollow but this does not hinder me from posting my views if the blog content is worth the effort.
All Things Juliet recently posted…Marketing Tools to Improve Business Popularity and Growth
“blog commenting as their main link building strategy. A dangerous trait, for sure.” -True! I think local business directory submission should be a main strategy instead of spammy blog commenting. Getting your biz listed on maps.google.com and bing makes you legit + backlinked.
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yah …blog commenting is a good strategy to build backlinks…but without expierence people cant do this…
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I though commenting helps in your website’s SEO but perhaps not … thanks Nandita for this info..
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If you’re talking about regular blogs with nofollow comments, then I’d definitely agree that there’s no SEO value to be gained. But, if you can find some dofollow blogs (and there are still a few out there), then I would think it would be helpful. Kind of fits in with your overall argument, too, which is to comment selectively and purposefully.
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Sad to say, there are existing people who don’t mind etiquette here in the WWW. In blog commenting, you really have to think on how you will get the attention of others and be careful of your words, be cautious or else you might realize that after you submit you’re comment, you are out of the topic.
In other words, take your time.