Does It Make Sense To Leave Comments On Blogs For Website Promotion

In beginner-guides on Internet marketing or blog promotion, you’ll often see the recommendation to find other blogs in your niche and leave comments there. Can blog-commenting like this really help your own website? How can you get more traffic from placing comments on other blogs? Read on to find out.

Benefits of Commenting on Blogs

Blog Commenting can be beneficial to your site in two ways. On the one hand, you get to enter your website URL when you leave a comment and your name in the comment will be a link back to that URL. This means that each comment you leave equals one back link for you. This is good for search engine optimization (SEO). Those links will be very diverse as well, coming from different IP’s, different domains and so on.. This is also a factor that is beneficial in terms of SEO.

The second factor has very little to do with search engines, but rather with actual humans: 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. This increases the chances of people clicking through to check out that post (especially if you picked a baitish title). However, people, these days don’t really use such plug-ins.

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

Blog-Commenting: The Cons

Blog commenting isn’t all great, though, there are also some serious downsides to it as a website promotion technique. As you may know, almost all comments on blogs are tagged “nofollow”, meaning that Google doesn’t properly credit or “follow” those links. In other words, links from blog comments mostly won’t help your own site climb to a higher position in Google’s search engine results. There’s a lot of discussion about how exactly nofollow-links are treated by Google. Some say they are completely ignored, some say they just don’t pass authority (or “link-juice”) but still help in getting your pages indexed and other’s claim that nofollow is practically completely ignored.

Whatever the case may be, it’s certain that nofollow links are of lower value than dofollow links. In fact, even a blog’s comments are dofollow, the links you’ll be getting will still be relatively, low-value. On the one hand, Google realizes that the link is placed in a comment section and therefore self-made and it will give this kind of link less credit. Also, your comment will often be one among many, so the link-juice gets diluted as it’s distributed to many sites.

And that’s also a problem concerning the human visitors: If you comment on a popular, high-traffic blog, you’ll probably be one among dozens or even hundreds of commenters. This decreases the chances of people paying attention to your comment and wanting to click through to your own site. If you’re commenting on a low-popularity blog, you may be among the only few commenters, but there won’t be that many people even seeing your comment, so once again, you won’t get many visitors.

Finally, your comment should be relevant to the post it belongs to and it should be interesting and genuine. If you simply wite “Great post!” or something along those lines, your comment is likely to get marked as spam and even if it does get through, it won’t generate any interest with human visitors. In other words: Good blog commenting takes a lot of time. You have to actually read all the posts you want to comment on and think of something insightful to say about them. As a “normal” blog visitor, reading posts because you are interested in the subject and leaving comments because you want to interact, this is not an issue at all, of course. But if all you’re trying to do is some Internet marketing for your website, then I think you’ll soon get fed up with the blog commenting strategy.

In short, the links you can get from blog commenting are fairly low-value.

Blog Commenting Mistakes

Avoid leaving shallow and short comments without even reading the posts. Even if comments like this pass the junk 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. It can be a useful addition to a larger strategy, but it should not be your main thing.

So, is blog commenting good online marketing practice? In my opinion: No. Ultimately, there are many ways to build backlinks that get you better results in less time. Leave real comments on blogs if you truly want to interact with the blog owner and the community. That’s the original and still the ideal purpose of comments sections.