Are Blog Comments now useless?
-
Hello
I see there is much debate on this issue of Blog Commenting. Is it still a useful way to get a backlink? Would you suggest only using 'No follow' blogs to leave comments?
Many thanks
-
Eliathah - I agree. Blog commenting is extremely inefficient use of time. I wonder how many of the people who promote blog commenting as a method to obtain traffic would pay someone else to put "meaningful comments" on relevant (no-follow) blogs. I wouldn't and I doubt many people would.
-
Yes I'm afraid they are useless when it comes to incorporating them into your SEO stategy.
Better to take the energy you would have expended tracking down do follow comment opportunities and spend it creating rich content like posts, guides, infographic(high quality only) and useful widgets.
Yes it's harder now than pre Panda but good in a way because the barrier for entry is that little bit higher and that gives you an advantage over new starters who want to cut corners and steal your customers.
Good luck, you're going to rock!
-
Blog commenting is a crappy way to spend your time if your goal is to get quality backlinks for SEO purposes. With that said, I have clients that receive substantial (relevant) traffic on a daily basis from blog comments they posted a while ago, so i know first hand that blog comments can drive traffic.
Is it ever the MOST productive and efficient use of your time? Probably not. Not unless you're commenting on blogs you already read regularly. Going out of your way to search for relevant blogs, reading articles you have no interest in besides getting traffic from the comment link, and crafting comments that grab peoples attention and encourage click throughs...? I can only speak for myself, but that doesn't sound like the most effective use of my time.
-
I agree, Simon pretty much summed it up pretty well. I was thinking the question was asking "Is it still a useful way to get a backlink?" which it is but only if done right and not a one time action. We're obviously on the same page though. Thanks for the clarity in your answer.
-
Hi Darin,
We might've gotten confused with the OP's question.
I agree with you of course in marketing terms but the OP's question is referring to backlinks. Backlinks as in SEO not PR. Hence my answer commenting for SEO purposes are useless and not a good idea.
Commenting for marketing and PR is good, but be selective.
-
Comments from William and Darin show the two different types of blog commenting. Let me expand:
Type 1:
Commenting on any blog you can get your hands on linking back to your site (those that will let you): This is the kind of blog commenting that you should avoid like the plague. It will do you no good and will simply be a waste of time these days.
Type 2:
Commenting on blogs that mean something in your industry and commenting with content people want to read: Like with any kind of content, if it is content people want to read it can be valuable. If you are selling running shoes and you build your authority on an athletics blog and your comment is contributing to a conversation and a link to your site is relevant and valuable to the users then by all means this is the kind of blog commenting you want to involve yourself in and can be very beneficial in the long run.
Hope that helps.
-
I have to disagree with William Lau.
I think that blog commenting has changed a bit. It think it is still relevant. I prefer the term Comment Marketing and Link Earning because that is my goal, to market my site and earn links. Here is how I do it now.
I find blogs that are relevant to my industry and of people who I really want to have link to me (authority figures). I follow their blogs and comment regularly on them. My goal is to build up enough trust and awareness of what I am all about. I have two goals here. 1) if my comments are good then people will want to learn more about me and click on my profile/link to go to my site (not so much for SEO purposes but for site traffice) ( I don't care if I'm number one if no one goes to my site. Traffic is important to me. Even better, relevant traffic.) and 2) I want to be able to eventually earn the right to become a guest blogger or have that person read about me and link to my site because of it's good content.
I think the idea of posting a comment for the sake of posting a comment is pointless. SEO is changing (for the better) and SEO now should stand for Search EXPERIENCE Optimization and not Search Engine Optimization. Comment Marketing is relevant if you use it to help build traffic and not to earn "traditional SEO links".
-
Yes, blog spamming is not really a smart idea. Plus majority of blog platforms nofollow comment links.
The only way you will benefit from blog comments are if they actually help the reader and is more of a marketing tactic than SEO.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Blog post back link
Hi, I am new to SEO and I am planning to hire someone in Fiverr regularly to submit different guest posts on the different related topic on the website with a good domain authority (>60) as a result to have some quality inbound links. As I am writing the guest post myself, May I know how many backlinks should I have per post are best for SEO? and should I only focus on anchor text backlinks? Also, here is my understanding of what I should be careful when hiring someone on Fiverr to do a blog post, please let me know if I am wrong and if there is another thing I need to be careful. It needs to be dofollow link It is permanent I check the website domain authority and spam sore that the person provides before using it. Please let me know if I missed out something. Appreciated Kind regards Chris
Link Building | | KINSHUN0 -
Handling External links to articles in a blog
I have a blog that has it's own articles but then also want to feature third-party sites that have my op-ed content on them. Wondering what is the best practice for handling external links. The reason we want to do this: Make sure our followers and people who subscribe to our blog see all our content (especially when a third-party "high authority" publisher is featuring articles from our authors We also want to be able to get a ranking for the article title when someone searches for it on Search Engines. i.e I write an article for hubspot called "my article about something". When googling "my article about something" I want to see both the Hubspot listing (where my article originated on) as well as a link to my website where I show an abstract (original abstract) and then the link links to the hubspot article. For example: www.myblog.com/listing (renders a listing of articles with links to each individual article) If showing an "abstract" for the blog article and then linking out to the third-party source (where content is featured) www.myblog.com/category/post-title (renders actual article page) When showing an individual post-title page what are the minimum requirements (META TAGS, length or amount of characters ,etc) Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | dspete0 -
External linking on a company blog
This has been bothering me for a long time. Our company has a sub-domain blog that gets a respectable amount of traffic but not a lot of SER. Most of our traffic comes from social shares (although we do rank really high for a few key searches). The blog manager is convinced that providing external links to additional resources or source material "dilutes the SEO juice" for the blog. URLs are provided, but they aren't linked. Attempts to sway her to the idea that external links are actually Good Things® have been stonewalled. Tell me I'm right and why.
Link Building | | AMSVansSEOTeam0 -
Host a wordpress blog as a folder or external site?
I've been speaking to our developers as I want to introduce a blog. My intention is to host the blog as part of our existing site, so the url becomes www.example.com/blog I have a personal wordpress blog and I love it, the amount of plugins, themes and ease of use makes it a fantastic platform. I spoke to my developers and requested if they could install Wordpress within a folder of our existing website. This gives me control to do plugins, custom themes etc. Straight forward I thought, but I didn't get a straight forward reply. They went on that it would require two linux php servers, a load balancer between them, and set up and configuration would take 5 days. Their day rates are high, so 5 days is a lot of money. This got me thinking, what if I hosted it externally and linked from our website, so the blog URL would be www.myblog.com This gives me the power to have a wordpress blog for cheap and use all the fantasic plugins to optimise the site (Yoast, Schema plugins etc). I know for SEO, it's better to host it as part of your existing site, the ranking juice remains in your area and it further helps strengthen the site. But then i'm thinking, if the wordpress stand alone blog works out, it will end up being a great external linker, further boosting my existing site's presense. Have any of you faced any similar problems? Thoughts?
Link Building | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Blog Comments Criteria Question
When I am commenting on blogs to get links, what criteria should I use to make sure the blog is valuable and wont hurt me in the long run?
Link Building | | bigeyecreative0 -
Should we imitate our competitor's blog network?
One of our competitors has built a little blog network, and I'm wondering if it's worth it for us to imitate it. Here's how they have it set up: They have domain.com, their e-commerce site, and blog.domain.com. They also have a half-dozen EMD blogs set up that all link to each other and to the e-commerce site, each one supplying content related to one niche of their busines (e.g. kitchenwidgets.com, widgetsforkids.com, etc.). It seems they've been doing this since December 2011. In my opinion, the content on these EMD blogs is pretty low value. Sure enough, they have basically no inbound links from outside the blog network, and it's not getting shared socially. I'm having a hard time imagining a lot of long-tail searches that would bring in qualified shoppers, since they basically just write up 300-word long descriptions of photos. Based on SEMrush data, it doesn't look like this approach is hurting them -- they didn't take a Penguin dive in April, for example. But how likely is it that this approach is helping them enough to justify the time they must spend writing (probably ~30-60m a day)? It would be trivial for the algo to determine that these are not natural links and completely devalue them. Would it not be better to consolidate that time into 2.5-5hrs a week spent researching and writing a valuable, link-worthy, long-tail-rich post for the main blog and then promoting it in hopes of attracting natural links?
Link Building | | CMC-SD0 -
Performancing.com guest blogging service ok?
Hi MozFans, A client is interested in working with the guest blogging service of performancing.com. They seem to have a lot of good contentwriters and post on (most) niche blogs. Guestblogging is a good thing for seo, when it's on relevant sites with a quality article.
Link Building | | MaartenvandenBos
The client hasn't got a lot of time to write and find blogs himself. Any positive or negative experiences?
Or other options 🙂 Thanks!1 -
Good guest blogging communities?
Besides My Blog Guest, does anyone know of any good guest blogging communities? The aforementioned, based on my few weeks of use, seems like a great community for guest blogging. Curious if any similar sites exist.
Link Building | | Greg_Gifford0
