Link building with blog comments
Published by on September 30th, 2008 4 Comments »
There is something of a dilemma for any website marketer who build links by commenting on others' blogs: how to generate those sometimes valuable links while maintaining respect for the target blog.
SEO forums contain endless requests for fast link building techniques, and one of the most straightforward means of creating links pointing to your site is by commenting on relevant and high quality blogs. But this can lead to indiscriminate “spamming” of blog comments purely to create the required links and offering little value to the comment discussion thread.
It’s a matter of respect
Underpinning ethical, high quality SEO and online marketing techniques is the need to work with the end user in mind. And that premise must be extended to commenting on other blogs in order to create links to your site – or “blog seeding” as it is sometimes called.
When does seeding turn into spamming? Simply when the link generating comments offer no genuine contribution to the discussion.
Avoiding the dofollow switch-off
The term “dofollow” refers to links that do not contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute – something the majority of blog systems add to comment links by default in an often ineffective attempt to reduce spam. Search engines ignore the links created with “nofollow” and so such links have no SEO value.
Lists of “dofollow” blogs appear in abundance on SEO forums and groups, resulting in a flood of spam-like, worthless comments from low quality link-builders. Consequently, the blog owner tires of all the necessary comment filtering and dilution of the comment discussions, and switches back to “nofollow”.
Just a little consideration on the part of the commenters, and this switch-off can be avoided.
It is a transaction
We should consider the opportunity to comment on a blog as a priviledge. Adding a link to a website within that comment, is a transaction with the blog owner. The commenter provides value to the blog’s content, in return gets to leave a potentially valuable link.
If SEO comment link builders followed this notion, we would have so many more “dofollow” blogs on which to comment.
4 Responses to “Link building with blog comments”
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Absolutely spot on blog. As a fellow seo’r, I find blog commenting effective. Although I always contribute to the conversation. Instead of ‘nice blog, well done’, I have even been known to research the topic discussed. After all commenting on a blog could also mean visitors from the blog to your clients site. If you post irrelevant or even ’spammy’ posts you could be facing turning away potential customers.
The breakthrough happened with the development of Google, and most notably, PageRank. This technology considers a link to a page a vote for the quality of the page. In addition, links are themselves weighted by the referring site’s value.
As a webdesigner myself , I’m glad to see that someone brought up this topic.
Many people out there don’t understand what all is involved in our industry, and I think also we are all too often not appreciated enough
or taken for granted. Never the less I’m immensely glad to see that you may feel the same way I do , thanks so much for this post!
Hello just stumbled your blog and i thank you for your story it was interesting. I am curious about doing link building for my website too. Have you used the scrapebox.com program? If so is it good? If not then what is the best tool? Thank you.