Is Blog Commenting For Backlinks Useless For SEO?
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When I first dip my toe in SEO back in 2011, building blog comment links was still a very popular tactic. Even though most blogs had the “no-follow” attribute in their blog comments, some did not. By using ScrapeBox, it was possible to find such blogs at scale.
As a result, a lot of blogs got really spammy comments, especially the ones that did not have the “no-follow” attribute.
Then, Google Penguin update came alone and pretty much destroyed that tactic.
So why am I talking about it here?
Do blog comments help SEO?
Interestingly enough, based on an experiment I did, blog comment backlinks seem to provide a little bit of SEO value.
One of my websites “HEG” (I introduced it for the first time in this post) did not have any backlinks until February 2016. So, my team and I did an experiment by selecting two articles that target low competition keywords and did competitor backlink analysis. We then selected only blog sites and started posting a comment on these blogs.
The blogs we selected all had “no-dollow” attribute in the link we created and we built about 80 links. Not all of these links got approved and we have not analyzed how many actually went live at this point.
I expected to see these articles ranking higher for the keyword they were targeting, but instead, something interesting happened.
We started seeing other articles ranking higher in Google and started getting a little more traffic than before the experiment. As you can see in the data below from Google Analytics, we started seeing an increase in the overall organic traffic after about 4 weeks (early March).
At this point, the HEG site does not have a very good internal linking structure. The only links going from and to between posts are the standard category/tag site-wide links. This makes it even more interesting for the fact that the site would actually rank higher on the keywords we did not build backlinks for.
Conclusion
Based on this mini-experiment, building blog comment backlinks seem to help the overall organic search visibility.
Have you seen a similar result done by some other websites or on your own website? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
In case you are interested, we have created a backlink building guide for you to check it out.
According to my experience yes blog comments links have lot of value if one is getting back linking from the product related niche. Also it depends upon the blog where the user is posting its comment and the quality of comment.
Thank you for confirming my finding from this mini-experiment Rosy.
Do you have a process for building blog comment links?
Would love to know how you find these blogs if you don’t mind sharing it.
Tonight I’ve been reading articles and watching videos specifically about this topic. Do blog backlinks matter and in experiment after experiment people like yourself have shown that, indeed, they do make a difference.
The increase is not earth shattering, but when used in conjunction with other methods it can definitely give a page that push it needs to breach the top. Not including the referral traffic and the backlinks those comments can create if you deep link your content and have well thought out, useful information.
One great thing about search engines; they may not share their exact algorithms, but careful experimentation can really help one understand the mechanics.
Thanks for the post!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Vincent.
It is indeed interesting to see something that most people thought have no SEO value turns out to be a valuable SEO tactic.
I think blog comment is not good at now, web 2.0 is better. It’s right ?. I had use more backlink from some blog and some forum but my site is not improve the rank. Can you help me ?
Blog commenting should not be the primary backlink building strategy. Web 2.0 does help but it should not be the only way to build links either.
The best way to build links naturally is doing various outreach link building such as resource page links, guest post links, skyscraper technique, scholarship offering etc.
So by doing all of these, you should be able to boost ranking for your site. All these are time consuming so if you are really serious about building links to your site, you need to set up a team.
Backlink building is such a diverse topic so I recommend reading some SEO blogs that specialize in it, such as this one http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies.
Also, try to stay away from PBN (https://digitalreadymarketing.com/private-blog-network-pbn/), it’s costly to maintain and Google may one day find out about it.
No they are still working and High PR Dofollow Blog comments links are best.
Tony, this is so valuable! And your post is amazing. Keep sharing..
Hi, Tony!
I have read your post and learned a lot about blog commenting.
I have a question, Low OBL blog site is important for blog commenting?
Thanks for your nice guideline!
The primary focus was around quality of the conversation. We did select sites that had a bit of authority, which makes sense since we wanted to have a conversation on a site that has been around for a while and hope to have that comment link on the site for quite sometime in the future.
Is commenting on edu or govt. blogs valuable for any niche website
how to find best edu blogs for commenting ?
This is very much great and hope fully nice blog. Every body can easily get perfect information from here.
Really informative.
The article is really helpful for me.
Thanks for the post.
Does it really help to comment on blogs with high page and domain authority even if the blog is a nofollow? or should it be dofollow but has low PA and DA?
Major Thanks for this information. From your post, it is easy to understand how quality backlinks are formed. But I have one question, Suppose I created a backlink on someone’s website, then do the URLs of that website have to crawl in Google itself or else Google crawl itself.MNGADGET
Now a days almost none of the good blogs allow do follow back links from commenting. Most of the sites have no follow tag for commenting back links. Well commenting backlinks don’t have much value these days so we should not focus on commenting that much as we used to do before..
thank you very much for your informative article and more thanks for i get best idea read this article about building blog comment backlinks. many more days i was searched this topics, finally i got it.
Nobody also us to do “do follow” comments. if you will comments anywhere on the Internet than you will only get “no-follow” backlinks. These days getting lots of backlinks can be a trouble for you so avoid to get lots of comments backlinks. These are not so much valuable.
I guess it’s still working if blog allows to give do follow backlinks
Hi Tony,
I agree with you. We should not make blog commenting a primary action in our backlinking strategy. However, it can be a secondary action because it adds value to our SEO practices. When you are developing an SEO strategy, you should set out primary and secondary actions. Primary actions should include technical SEO, content optimization, search engine marketing, etc. Secondary actions should include blog commenting, sharing the content of others, etc. It is important to make SEO strategy discretely. There are many ways through which you can gather backlinks. Some ways may work for you, some may not. Therefore, you should determine which one is worth your time and effort.
Hello Tony,
Thanks for giving valuable information about the blog commenting. Blog commenting is only getting the backlinks and it is also medium to earn the traffic. I am eagerly waiting for your next publication..
Hey, I would like to say thanks a lot for sharing this valuable information with us. It seems really informative. I’m trying to use backlinks building strategy, hope your case will help me))
Blog commenting is an good link for us, its react like forums link. Which helpful increase authority of domain.
Blog comments are not useless they are an important aspect of SEO. If blog commenting will be done on high authority websites then it will be beneficial.
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vary good post..
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This is a nice and useful article for increase quality backlinks to our website… thank you for this article…
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Thanks Again.
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Thanks Again.
I agree that blog commenting should not be the only strategy for link-building, but I doubt anyone does that anyway. If the blogs you target have high metrics, I can’t see why blog comments would hurt – actually, they likely help. If the blogs are related to your website, it likely helps.
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Does it also increase domain authority, considering the comments have no-follow attributes.
awesome blog! this was a question i have been asking for a long time. so thankful for this article!