Does blog commenting work for SEO?

There are two main SEO benefits to blog comments – one direct, one indirect.

Blog commenting can be seen as both a quantity-based and a quality-based method of link building (or even both at the same time), depending on what approach you take.

Let’s quickly define what we’re talking about when we talk about blog commenting for SEO:

• Commenting on different dofollow blogs
• Adding a backlink to your website to the comment, either in the body of the comment or just to the Website URL section of the comment form

direct blog comment seo benefit

The effectiveness of blog commenting for SEO in terms of direct benefit is debatable. Some people say it’s useless, some people claim it works. My own view on blog commenting for direct SEO benefit is based on personal experiences and the experiences of others. I’m certainly not claiming that blog commenting is the best, most valuable link building method out there. I do believe, however, that blog commenting is a quantity-based link building method that can be useful to build a strong link profile.

In terms of direct SEO benefit, blog comments aren’t really worth much. However, “not worth much” is a far cry from “not worth anything”. When delivered in high quantities, blog comments can help to strengthen your link profile. But like anything else, a link profile based exclusively on blog comments alone won’t really be sufficient. A variety of links is required and blog commenting can be one of the various link building tactics that you use.

Some people say that blog comments have been so abused that search engines don’t really give them any weight anymore. This is true to an extent, but first hand experience and accounts of others still show that blog commenting can have a positive impact on search engine rankings.

indirect blog comment seo benefit

The indirect SEO benefit of blog commenting comes from forming relationships with other bloggers and catching the attentions of authors, who may then link to your website from their blog posts. A link in the comment may not be worth much, but a link in the post itself, especially in the post of a blog with a strong link profile of its own, can provide considerable value.

keep your seo blog comments relevant

1. No spam. Those spammy comments that we all get made up of gibberish or nonsensical auto-generated text with links embedded inside? Don’t do that. Not only do these kinds of things obviously never get mentioned in the blog posts, completely eliminating the indirect SEO benefit outlined above, but they are also likely to land you on a spammer blacklist, which can then flag your comments on other blogs as spam as well and reject them automatically.
2. Well thought out. You might not think writing “Great post, thanks!” is considered spam, but it is. The comment should be well thought out and relevant to the blog post you’re commenting on. Put thought into a comment. Good blog commenting is not a two-second job.
3. Keep links to a minimum. Unless you have a particular page on your site that is extremely relevant to what the post is talking about, avoid links in the body of your comment and restrict your linking to the website URL field in the comment form instead. With so much spam floating around, bloggers are often hesitant about allowing links in the body of comments unless the link is obviously very relevant.

At the end of the day, there is no good reason not to comment on other blogs for either the direct or indirect SEO benefit you can get (or both).

Google does not hate SEO.

There seems to be a general consensus among people who aren’t really familiar with the relationship between Google and SEO professionals that SEO is somehow cheating the system, that Google hates SEO, or that SEO is “evil”. On the contrary, white-hat SEO professionals and Google work well together in a symbiotic relationship of sorts. Google often divulges search engine ranking advice and updates publicly. Matt Cutts especially (the head of Google’s Webspam team) has a long history of elaborating on particular aspects of Google’s algorithm and how certain changes impact website rankings.

what white-hat seo does for google

Google’s job is to provide fresh, relevant, useful results to its users. White-hat SEO professionals recognise this and, by understanding Google’s goals and how it attempts to accomplish them, work with Google’s algorithms to improve their own clients’ search engine rankings. Therefore, improving their clients’ search engine rankings implores SEOs to generate fresh, relevant, useful content. This in turn improves the quality of Google’s results.

what google does for white-hat seo

Because white-hat SEO encourages the production of useful high quality content, Google is only too happy to assist by being transparent about how it ranks websites to an extent. They obviously can’t reveal every ranking factor or tell us about every change, but they do tend to be quite transparent on some topics. As an example, Matt Cutts goes into great detail to talk about PageRank sculpting, explain the inner workings of the “nofollow” attribute and how PageRank is passed when a nofollow is present on a page.

if google condemned white-hat seo

If Google suddenly started to condemn all SEO practices, not just those that manipulate the search results in misleading ways, white-hat SEOs would be more likely to cross the line into the more dodgy methods. By working with white-hat SEOs and even providing advice and insight into how Google ranks websites in search results, Google is encouraging fair practices and the production of non-spammy, high quality content online.

search without white-hat seo

White-hat SEO centers around two main activities:

• Making sure a website can actually be found by search engines and its content crawled easily
• Increasing the visibility of a website in organic search results by making sure a website keeps up with (and surpasses) its optimised competitors in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)

White-hat SEO should be thought of not as the practice of trying to “cheat” Google, but that of helping Google to find content relevant to the user’s query and helping businesses to make their content more easily found. If SEO did not exist, we would likely still have websites with extremely useful content organised and structured in ways that a search engine would never find. I still see websites with what would otherwise have been great content stuffed into an image. Good luck finding that super useful page now, buddy.

misconceptions about seo

On Lifehacker, a post recently appeared seemingly discouraging people from hiring SEO professionals and referring to SEO as “snakeoil”. I found this amusing, as the advice they gave to business owners and webmasters matches almost exactly some of the things that any white-hat SEO professional who knows what he/she is doing has been saying for years. In other words…they spoke out against SEO while making points that SEOs themselves have been making for years.

In conclusion, SEO isn’t evil any more than a knife is evil. It only becomes “good” or “evil” in the hands of the person using it.