Making comments in blogs has been used as a SEO strategy for a long time. The intention has been to get back-links to your website in order to raise Page Rank and/or raise selected keyword-phrases for your website in search engines. As a bonus from this strategy you could also drive in direct traffic, but the main purpose of this SEO strategy has always been about the link you would get back to your web-site.
If you were to look around in SEO forums about link-building, you would often see people referring to this strategy as one of the easier ways of getting back-links to your website. This kind of statement shows that their SEO knowledge is lacking regarding to this particular SEO strategy. It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it that is important.
To use this blog commenting effectively for SEO purposes there is more to it than to just post a comment in any blog, chose quality before quantity. I’ve always believed and implemented this and after the Penguin update 2012 this is truer than ever.
Do not under-estimate the blog research; it is a time-consuming, but crucial task.
To give you a picture of how time-consuming it can be to find just a few good SEO friendly blogs: when I collect a list with 15,000 blog domains, I will run them in a program which will show details such as domain PR, page PR and outgoing links, but the most important thing is that the program also indicates blogs that are ‘do-follow’. From the list, around 200-600 will show ‘do-follow’, the other thousands and thousands of blogs all have the nofollow tag. But the program can only check for some of the technical aspect, there’s more to it than just that, so now comes the time-consuming task of manually checking them for criteria such as:
1. Is the blog still active?
2. Still approving comments?
3. Is the outgoing comment links really ‘do-follow’?
4. Is the comment area in Java (if so, the link will not be found by Google)?
5. Are there redirects on the link?
6. Has the blog been over-spammed?
7. Does the blog have pages with Page Rank?
8. Which requirements are needed to place a comment (many blogs require registration or subscription)?
After this has been checked I might have a list of 50-100 left that are good to use, I do however have a list of blogs that I’ve collected over the last 4 years so I would only be adding around 15-40 new ones from a research of this volume.
After this I will manually start with the blogs that the program showed as ‘no-follow’, and these will be in thousands. I can’t possibly check all so here I’ll have to go for combinations based on experience of what might be a possible usable blog. I will often base my decision on domain Page Rank, page PR, page-title etc. When searching the blogs that the program showed as no-follow can be described as fishing; sometimes I will get lucky and draw in the big catch.
You will need blogs related to your own niche
• Niche blogs
I’ve always believed in quality when it comes to blog-commenting as a SEO strategy, the selection of the blogs is important; you want to get links from related blogs with good page rank. However, if you have a small niche, there’s just not going to be many related blogs that fulfills the criteria of a SEO friendly blog. Some of the blogs you might find might not even want to approve your comment if they see you as competition.
• Related pages
Sure, related blogs is the best ones to comment on, but one important factor not to forget when trying to strengthen your website’s link profile is that you get links from different IP’s.
Broaden the selection of blogs by using authority blogs that have pages that are related to your website. There are quite many blogs that have under-sections that will suffice. For example, let’s say that your website is about yoga; expand to blogs for women and health blogs.
TIP! If you are operating within a small niche, guest posting can be a good SEO strategy since there will be more sites available giving good back-links for a good written article.
Final Words
Using blog commenting as a SEO strategy after the Penguin update comes down to quality in terms of selecting which blogs to post in and that you also contribute with a quality comment. The biggest job will be the research that you will have to carry out in order to find related blogs and pages for your specific niche.
The upside is that at this point you just have to follow your list and write comments, and the average quality of the links will be very high, that’s when and how all of the blog research pays off big time. That’s when and how you can get a lot of good links fast and easy.
FINAL TIP! Don’t forget to get links from different sources not just from blog commenting, in order to raise a strong healthy link-profile you will have to mix it up, and I will say it once again, quality is the key.
