A Basic Guide to Link Building via Blog Commenting

Posted by Christina on Jul 22nd, 2010

There is a lot of debate about the value of blog commenting as a form of link building, it still appears to be a very popular linking strategy and I have found visitor numbers increase when I have commented in a blog.

Benefit of Blog Commenting

If you want to increase traffic, improve PageRank and boost your position in the SERPs you should start commenting in blogs. Below are a few tips I hope will help get you started.

Traffic

If you are looking for ways to increase traffic to your website, your best bet is to comment in blogs receiving lots of traffic that are in your industry.

To find popular blogs in your niche, you can check out the variety of blog directories out there - here are a few to start you off:

• Technorati - Use the search box at the top of the site - search for popular posts or blogs using specific keywords covering particular topics.
• Alltop - Alltop pulls in feeds from blogs on a variety of topics. You should have no problem finding a blog on a topic you want to comment on.
• PostRank - If you are after some analytics, visit PostRank and search for your topic. It will bring up a list of blogs that are tagged with that topic in order of social engagement, including comments and shares on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Delicious, Myspace, and more.

PageRank

If you are blog commenting to increase your websites PageRank, you should be looking for blog posts relevant to your subject, have PageRank themselves and preferably allow dofollow links. Dofollow links allows some of their PageRank to flow through to your website.

It can be a bit hit and miss searching for directories and blogs with dofollow blog lists as their PageRank information maybe out of date, or they may have been a dofollow once but have changed to nofollow in recent months.

I find Seoquake's extension is quite a good way to find blog posts with high PR. When you install it, go to the Tools Menu > Seoquake > Preferences > SE plugins, tick the Enable box under Google as well as change Load parameters to 'by request' so you don't overload Google and Yahoo with requests as they will ban you from using their search engine for a couple of hours, it happened to me when I first started out and its painful.

You can then search in Google using your keywords plus additional phrases to find blog posts. You will be able to sort the results by PageRank by clicking on the PR:?. Up and down arrows then appear, click on these to sort the results from highest to lowers PR.

Be warned, quite a number of blog commenting systems will require you to register to be able to leave a comment, but as you are serious and not a Spammer this shouldn't be a problem for you.

SERPs

For boosting SERPs for your keyword phrases, you will need to find relevant blogs with dofollow links, you will also need to use anchor text within your link. To ensure you can leave anchor text within your comment or heading, check through the comments and see if anyone else has used anchor text and how they have gone about doing it and implement the same strategy. If there is no anchor text the moderators of the site probably removed them from the comments before they are posted.

Do not Spam

Thankfully many blog sites have spam filters or moderators keeping an eye on comments. So please do not comment if you are not going to add anything of value just so you can gain a link, you probably will not get past the moderators and you do not want to get flagged as a spammer. However, if you do want to comment and want to stand out from the spammers and be seen as a legitimate commenter you can try out the following:

Avatars

Stand out from the spammers and use a Avatar. It makes your comment more personal and show's you want others to know who you are. If by any chance you end up in the spam filter at least you will stand out as spammers do not tend to use Avatars.

Profiles

Some sites will require you register before being allowed to submit comments. It takes a couple of minutes to create a profile where you might as well sell yourself as much as possible. Spammers are not going to bother doing this properly if at all.

Subscribe to comments

Spammers usually comment on the highest PR post they can find, or they hit as many posts as possible and never come back. I would recommend you only comment in two or three posts, relevant to your subject to start with and subscribe to comments enabling you to be notified via email if the blogger has responded to your comment allowing you to go back and answer.

Moderation

You might think you have got past the moderator, but I would recommend you come back in a few days to check your comment or links are still there. If not it's a good sign you are considered a spammer and you will need to approach the moderator to prove you are a serious business person and not a spammer.

Getting Links in the Body of the Comment Approved

Probably the biggest spammer red flag are comments with a link embedded in the body of the comment. If the blog allows you to add a link in a website field, I would go with that first over adding the link to the body of the comment to get it approved. But if you don't have that as an option, you have these options.

1. Include the link as your "signature" like you would in an email. Sometimes this will slip by moderation.
2. Include your link only if it answers a question from the blog post or another commenter. If the blog post says "where can I buy dog food at a good price" and your link is a discount pet food supply store, then it might be welcome.
3. Include your link only if it somehow adds value to the post. If the blog post is about website analytics (preferably a comparison of services out there and not simply an advertisement post about one service), and your link is to an analytics service, you can include it as an additional resource for people to check out when comparing analytics programs. Listing some differences and benefits of your analytics program compared to the ones listed in the post would also be a plus.
4. If none of this work for you, find blogs that have approved comments with links in their comment text. Chances are, they will be spammy, but if others have spammed it, you probably can too. Just make sure the other links aren't really trashy and you should be in ok company.

Above all your link should always add value to the conversation.

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