Blog commenting used to be an extremely popular search engine optimization technique. As the importance of links to one’s website became the world’s worst guarded secret, blog commenting was inevitably seen as one of the best methods of obtaining links from various websites. As this information become more widespread, every webmaster soon embarked on a quest to blog on as many comments as possible. Obviously, actually leaving great comments was secondary to the objective of obtaining a link to this own website.
However, the online marketing world has very noticeably changed over the recent years. Techniques have come and gone, trends have emerged, and search engines themselves have gotten better at everything (mostly!). One of these huge changes is that the effectiveness of blog commenting has thus steadily decreased and is now a mostly useless technique. Many people unfortunately still consider it as an effective technique and as a matter of fact devote a long time to finding “quality blogs to comment on”. However, there are many reasons why commenting on blogs is a huge waste of time you should not even consider during your online marketing campaign.
Chances that your comment will be approved are low
If you are leaving comments on blogs for the sole purpose of building links, this is almost always visible through the quality of your comments. However careful you may be to disguise your ultimate motive, webmasters have become exceptionally good at knowing whether comments are genuine or not – I am of course assuming you are not just leaving four word comments all over the Internet. As such, the likelihood that your comment is approved is extremely low. In the vast majority of cases, it is quite likely that your comment will be altogether ignored.
Even approved comments can turn out to be mostly useless
Back in the day, search engines were still in their infancy and any link to your website helped. However, most blog comments are now added the NoFollow attribute, which basically tells search engines not to consider such links and that these are not endorsed by the linking website. Moreover, even in those cases where comment links are not being added this NoFollow attribute, there is no doubt that search engines can actually recognize comment links from content links and treat them accordingly.
Moreover, you must realize that even if your link goes through, it will no doubt need to share that page with numerous other links, usually from other people trying to use blog commenting as an effective search engine optimization technique. This is particularly the case with pages that do not use the NoFollow attribute and that thus quickly get inundated with spam comments.
Effective blog commenting comes at a cost
I will admit that commenting on blogs can be an effective link building technique as long as you actually know what you doing. This requires a lot of time, research, and patience. If you seriously want to use blog commenting in your search engine optimization strategy, you need to take the time to read the blog, construct a proper comment that will be approved, and be very careful of what you are doing.
However, even if the comment is successfully posted, this may not result in a noticeable boost due to the factors I already outlined earlier. Some people argue that a well-placed comment link can result in a welcome number of clicks but this is noticeably only on popular blogs in a huge audience. Blogs where comment moderation is even more tightly enforced and where your comment needs to 100% relate to the article for the link to be approved.
This also works if you have already earned some reputation as a commenter but this requires a lot of time. Even so, there is no guarantee that people are actually going to click on your link, or the latter may go unnoticed among a flurry of other resource links.
Moving on
As I already mentioned, there is a way of making blog commenting effective instead of being lumped with the plethora of spammers already making a nuisance of themselves. However, blog commenting is still a technique that may often not be worth that effort. You would be much better off focusing on other techniques that are much more effective in the long term such as link baiting and guest blogging.
Ashvin is based in Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean and runs the popular Culture Réunion and Formation Ile de la Réunion blogs.