In beginner-guides on Internet marketing or blog promotion, you’ll often see the suggestion to find other blogs in your niche and leave comments there. How can this strategy, usually called blog-commenting, help your own website? Is it a good way to increase traffic? Read on to find out.

How Blog-Commenting Can Help You
Commenting on blogs can be beneficial to your site in two ways. First of all, each comment you leave will contain a link to your website (you get to specify the URL when you enter the comment). This means that each comment you leave equals one backlinkto your website. That’s great for search engine optimization. Another advantage is that you’ll be getting those backlinks from many different places, online (different IP adresses, different geographical locations, different domains etc.). This diversity is one of the things that search engines pay attention to.

The other benefit of blog commenting has nothing to do with SEO: People might click on the link to go check out your site. People might simply be intrigued by your comment and want to see what other stuff you’ve written.. You could almost say that you’ll be “stealing” a bit of traffic from the blogs where you’ve left your comments. Obviously, this only comes into play if you leave interesting comments that get people curious about your site.

If a blog uses ComLuv (aka CommentLuv), you’ll even get a link to your latest post, including the post title, displayed with your comment. Especially if you’ve chosen a spectacular or provocative title, this will increase the amount of people clicking through to check out an article.

In summary, leaving comments on blogs can help your Internet marketing campaign by creating backlinks and creating a small traffic stream from click-throughs.

Where Blog-Commenting is Limited
Regrettably, blog commenting also has some drawbacks as a link-building method. As you may know, almost all comments on blogs are tagged “nofollow”, meaning that Google doesn’t properly credit or “follow” those links. This means that having links from blog’s comments sections won’t increase your website’s rank in Google. Although there is much debate about whether Google really discounts nofollow-links or not, it’s safe to say that you’ll get substantially less or even no benefit from nofollow-links. In fact, even a blog’s comments are dofollow, the links you’ll be getting will still be relatively, low-value. Google “sees” that the links are coming from a comments section and that means that they were created by the site owners themselves. This is obviously less valuable than a link created by a third party. Secondly, your comment will usually be one among many, so any pagerank that gets passed will be split up and distributed to perhaps dozens of sites.

And that’s also a problem concerning the human visitors: Comments on blogs that get many visitors are usually “in good company”, meaning there will be dozens or hundreds of other comments. This decreases the chances of people paying attention to your comment and wanting to click through to your own site. On the other hand, less popular blogs won’t have many comments, but neither will they have many visitors. So, once again, you won’t get a lot of click-throughs.

Also take into account that your comment must be intriguing and relevant. If all you write is “Awesome post!” or “I agree. Nice blog!” or something like that, your comment will probably be filtered out as spam. And even if it’s not, no human visitor will become interested in what else you have to say and click on your link. In other words: Good blog commenting takes a lot of time. For it to work, you have to read the blog articles and then write something original about them in the comments. Of course, if you’re visiting blogs because you’re interested in them, this isn’t a problem at all, but if you’re trying to use blog-commenting purely as a website marketing strategy, you’ll soon find that building a few backlinks this way can swallow up several hours of your time.

In summary, the links you get through leaving comments tend to be of low value both in terms of search engines and human visitors..

Blog Commenting Mistakes
As already indicated, you should certainly avoid leaving short, worthless comments. Even if comments like this pass the spam filter (which they usually don’t), they are still a waste of your time and effort. They are also a bit of a slap in the face of the blog author, who tries to create great content and get readers interested.

There are many Internet marketing products that automate blog commenting or even do high-volume blog comment spamming. Of course, you should absolutely steer clear of any software like that, for all the reasons stated above.

Whatever you do, never rely on blog comments alone as your SEO method. While it can be a useful thing to do as part of a larger link-building strategy, it doesn’t have enough oomph to stand up on it’s own.

So, does blog commenting make sense as an online marketing strategy? In my opinion: No. Ultimately, there are many ways to build backlinks that get you better results in less time. Leave genuine comments on blogs if you truly want to interact with the blog owner and the community. That’s the original and still the best purpose of comments sections.

Tags: blog commenting, internet marketing strategy, website promotion

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2011 at 2:53 am and is filed under Video Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.