Is Blog Commenting Actually Worthwhile?

If you make a visit to the majority of the webmaster forums online, the one argument that seems to ensue is the value of blog commenting for earning one way backlinks. So, to answer whether or not that method is valuable or not, I will simply say that is it a very valuable method of promotion, when used responsibly. You will have to read on to see my conclusion to this argument.

First, I am going to talk about having a natural looking backlink structure. What I mean by this, is having a backlink structure that resembles exactly what happens in nature. The team behind Google are very good at finding out the methods that SEO Experts use to rank their sites, so naturally, one would assume that if Google got the idea that the big method of backlink generation at the time is article marketing, then they are more than likely going to end up discounting the value of these links somehow, if a website is ranking purely based on those backlinks alone.

However, a diverse range of backlink types within your backlink structure is always going to look good in Google’s eyes, as this looks natural. To use an example, lets say that site (a) has 400 backlinks that originates just from article directories, and site (b) has 400 backlinks, in equal quantity from article directories, blog comments, forum posts, RSS directories, and so on and so forth. Which one looks more natural?

Now, back to the blog commenting debate. I see it in as many webmaster forum posts as I can count, that blog commenting is extremely ineffective. Let me break the ice as gently as I can. If you have been told that blog commenting is an amazing method of high PageRank backlink generation, then you have been deceived. However, if you already have a steady collection of one way backlinks, by adding a few blog comments in here and there, you will most definitely achieve results, as this appears quite natural to Google.

So, you thought we were done, right? Wrong. There is another part to this debate, and that involves the value of follow and nofollow links. Many webmeisters will only target blogs that allow follow links in their comments, which is in itself a bad idea. Part of a natural backlink structure involves earning backlinks from various sources, and that most definitely includes follow and nofollow links. If you can imagine it, a website that has only follow links pointing to it wouldn’t look all that natural would it? This also applies to pages of varying PageRank as well.

The best practice here in all cases is to simply forget about PageRank, and completely and utterly forget about focusing only on link opportunities that are crawlable links. The idea here is to earn a combination of the two link types, as again, this appears as being very natural to Google. This is why so often, webmasters complain about this method being ineffective, because they simply chase after the followable backlinks, and their site is either slapped by Google or de-indexed, as when Google checks the backlink structure for that site, all it can see is 500 links from blog comments that are all from followable blogs that have a PageRank of 4 and above. Starting to get my drift?

In concluding this piece, I will refer to the question surrounding this article. Is blog blog commenting an effective method of SEO? The answer is only ever going to be yes, if this method is used responsibly as a method of varying the backlinks that point to your site. As with all methods, use it responsibly.