Is Blog Commenting a Valid Form of Link Building, Or is it Just Spam?

It’s an age old debate among internet marketers and SEO specialists; is blog commenting just another term for spamming, or is it a valid form of link building? Well, as with most things in life, it really depends on your point of view.

Blog owners encourage their readers to post comments on articles in their blog since this fosters a sense of community. It is a great way of engaging with your readers, giving them the chance to pass their ideas back to you and hopefully encouraging them to revisit your blog time after time to keep up on the progress of the discussions they have taken place in.

Looking from the perspective of the internet marketer, blog commenting allows you to gain easy back links to your site, which helps with your search engine rankings. In fact, providing you can find a suitable blog to comment on, blog commenting is a very powerful link building strategy, and is one of the fastest ways to get a high quality, relevant back link with anchor text that you can specify. Why write 500 word articles when a single line can get you a back link of the same weight? Of course, many internet marketers have cottoned onto this and have, unfortunately, abused the system – and that’s where the problem lies.

Because of unscrupulous marketers dropping hundreds of links for Viagra, drugs, and other unsavoury products, many blog owners have decided simply to switch off blog commenting altogether. Many others have resorted to making their links NOFOLLOW which lessens their effectiveness and so deters many blog commencers from using them as a method of gaining back links.

In order to get round these problems, the commenter’s (notice how I’m not calling them spammers yet) have resorted to increasingly sophisticated means such as advanced software tools and comment bots spam out thousands of comments automatically. The war has escalated. However, if you are thinking of doing blog commenting as a form a link building then, so long as you approach it in an ethical manner, then there is still a lot to be gained from doing it.

You will need to find good quality, relevant DOFOLLOW blogs and then post relevant comments on them. Finding the blogs is the time consuming part, but it is usually an effort that you will be well rewarded for. Make sure that your comments provide some value, not just “that’s great…check out my site” kind of things. This will get your comment approved and keep the blog owner happy as well.

Link building using blog commenting isn’t necessarily a bad practice – it has just gained a bad reputation in recent years thanks to misuse. However, done correctly, then it is a very fast and effective way to gain quality back links to your site and get a good stream of traffic for your efforts. Use it with care and reap the rewards.


TOP