You see a blog that is related to your website. You have been told that commenting and sharing links will help raise your SEO and rankings. Before you comment, you want to know if it is going to help.
Blog commenting is no longer a fast way to get backlinks and boost SEO. It may even result in your website receiving penalties and diminished SEO. However, when used correctly, it does still have benefits and doesn’t necessarily need to be turned off as a feature.
The longer, more complete answer is: to use blog commenting, you need to understand the history of commenting and how Google has adapted. This information will allow to carefully craft and place blog comments that can help SEO.
Problems with Blog Commenting
So, you have your website all set up. You have created keywords and placed them strategically throughout your pages so that you are search engine optimized. Now, you just have to wait for the traffic to come to your door.
At one time, creating a blog post with a link to your website would result in quick new backlinks. Then everyone started doing it. Blog commenting services were created that did it for you and promised to get you more backlinks. The outcome was blog posts with comments sections filled with linked filled spam messages.
This spamming motivated Google to respond with updates that changed how backlinks and SEO keywords were counted. Google now sees linked comments as a potential violation of their webmaster quality guidelines and an attempt to artificially inflate a website’s ranking.
Google has developed several different ways to discourage blog comments and meaningless linking.
- They created an algorithm to detect random links that it considers spam.
- The algorithm is highly complex, constantly learning, and continually being updated.
- They investigate questionable backlinks to discourage dishonesty.
- They have created harsher penalties for those caught using comments incorrectly.
This has resulted in an algorithm that looks for links that are overused, irrelevant, or “spammy” that they penalize. These penalties can range from your website being dropped in the rankings to being removed from the Google index completely.
Reasons to Make Blog Comments
Does that mean you should never make a blog comment or do a backlink? No. You just need to make sure that you are making the right comment, in the right way, to ensure you are meeting your goals.
The first step is to ask yourself what your goals are. If your purpose is to increase SEO hits and building links, blog commenting is not likely to be helpful’; it’s actually more likely to damage your website with those penalties. However, if you are wanting to generate leads, attraction attention, or do networking commenting, comments may be helpful.
Getting Leads
The key to making blog commenting work for you is planned targeted links and comments. Focusing on the value of the link and how it will help you accomplish your goals is important. One targeted backlink can generate more leads than several randomly scattered links.
Careful consideration and follow up with tracking to help ensure that your time spent doing comments and backlinks are helping you accomplish your goals.
Attracting Attention
Blog comments are a great way to connect with people and bring attention to you, your brand, and your website. Blog comments become a permanent part of the article itself. Those comments will be read by others reading the article.
This may not create backlinks or boost your SEO, but it can still create exposure. Strategic comments on articles that are likely to attract your target audience can draw them to your website.
This will not lead to immediate boost in your SEO. However, it can result in increased targeted website traffic. Over time, this will lead to improvement in your ranking.
Networking
Connecting with the right people can be the key to the success or failure of your website and brand. Blog comments can be a way to connect with those people.
Blog comments can be used to build a relationship with the blog author, other readers, or the website owner. This relationship can be potentially leveraged into doing a guest post, which result in highly effective backlinks.
How to Make Blog Comments Effective
If you’re going to use comments on your blog, you need to make sure they’re being used effectively. That means that they need to be strategic and purposeful, not only to comply with Google’s standard, but to bring legitimate traffic to your blog. No one wants to see spammy comments, but if they’re engaging, they may catch the reader’s eye.
Be Personal
It may seem simple. But, in today’s digital age, it can be nice for visitors to know that they’re interacting with another real person. Your blog comment is more likely to attract attention if you use your full name, your brand or company name, and a photo of yourself. Coupled with some personal anecdotes, especially in a niche you know well,
The best option for a photo is to ensure your email is attached to a Gravatar account with an updated photo of you.
Careful Placement
The key to having your blog comments attract the right traffic is having them placed where your target audience is. This is done in part by making sure that you are finding relevant websites with relevant blog posts to comment on. The other key is to make sure those blogs are getting a high level of traffic.
You have some options for finding websites that are similar to yours that also have high levels of traffic:
- Perform an Incognito Google Search — Open an incognito tab on Google so the answers are not tailored to you. Using the search operator “inurl:blog” search for keywords.
- Focus on High Authority Blogs — Look for blogs with a high level of traffic. The number of social shares or posts a blog has will help show this.
- Use Drop My Link — This tool helps you find blogs with commenting enabled with your keywords. The search can also show you websites that are high authority, that do not yet have a post. Best of all it is free.
Make It Meaningful
The higher authority the blog, the higher the traffic. That also means your comment is likely to get lost in a sea of comments. To make your comment stand out, you need to make sure it is meaningful and adds to the discussion.
People are more likely to pay attention and follow up on comments that are appropriate and meaningful to the conversation. You will want to include your link only when it is closely related to the blog post. When your website is relevant and your comment contributes to the conversation posting a link can generate new leads.
Make sure you have read the blog completely and understand the point the author was making. This is not a get clicks fast scheme. Think carefully about what you want to say and make it important. If your post seems as meaningful, that gives credibility to you and your brand.
Make it a Conversation
Writing one blog post and walking away is not likely to get much notice. Making a few comments increases your chance of getting noticed and allows you to interact with the author and the other readers, increasing your networking.
Careful use of Links
Remember you want your link to be relevant to the page in order to avoid being labeled spam. So make sure your link is tied to the blog. Typically this will be a landing page for your website, but it could be a similar blog you have written.
Final Thoughts
So is blog commenting for SEO gone forever? In the ways it was done in the past yes.
Can you still use blog commenting to help your SEO? Yes, When it is done carefully and with well thought out and placed meaningful comments, blog commenting can add draw attention to you and create value for your brand. It will let your connect with your target audience to draw them into your website.
