The power of Blog Commenting?

[EssEEmily]

In my link research today I found something interesting. I thought I would share and perhaps get some perspective on it.

The term I'm looking into is the moderately competative "cinnamon bread". Not surprisingly, the first page of results is mostly recipes. The first few All Recipes, Pioneer Woman and Joy the Baker are not all that surprising - all pretty big names in the world of online baking. But when I got the the 4th result I thought it was odd - passthesushi.com (more specifically http://passthesushi.com/fluffy-cinnamon-bread) with a DA of 38, respectable but not up there with the "big boys". Her on page elements are standard, not really optimized for much. She has a few hundred Facebook Fans and Google Connect followers.

Now even more curious, I looked into her backlinks and discovered a ton of different no follows. She obviously does a lot of commenting on other baking/recipe blogs. Could these no follows be helping her rankings? I was always under the impression blog commenting was more to build a community and get yourself in front of influencers...could these no follows actually be counting towards ranking?

Curious to hear some thoughts on this.

[MarieHaynes]

I keep waffling on how I feel about blog commenting.  I previously thought that it was a complete waste of time.  But, I see that one of my competitors in real estate is ranking really well and it looks like he just does blog commenting alone, and most of those are no-follow.

So, as I'm doing my daily reading of blogs I do try to comment where I think it will add to the conversation at the blog.  I don't make blog commenting a top priority but I add a few comments each week.

[nycdwellers]

Yes Yes and again Yes.

Nowadays No-Follow links pass link juice almost as the Do-Follow Links.

Let's look from Googles eye. If >90% of links are Do-Follow, it does not seem natural. Google may think that all the links are done by site owner to boost rank.

So both Do-Follow and No-Follow links pass link juice.

[WilliamBay]

Blog Commenting is huge for low to moderate competitive terms. In my experience I have many wedding photographers that rank only as a result of followed comment links.

In fact I know a group that have set up a system for announcing when they have posted something new, and the other members will go post a comment. It's a requirement to have No-Follow disabled.

The people posting get a link back to their site (it's obviously not a great link, but it's a link. It also isn't keyword targeted - too spammy for most site owners).

The site owners get lots of comments and their clients get to see that the photographer is popular and see great comments about themselves.

ETA: Sorry, I saw you were talking about No-Follow. Yes, there is some speculation that No-Follow is still passing some juice along. 
And it's also important to note that No-Follow isn't No-Index.

That means that Google can still crawl through the links that are No-Followed. The No-Follow is just to say that you don't "vote" for the site.