Does Blog Commenting help SEO?

One old SEO technique that I still see is that of blog commenting.

Years ago, it was an easy way to generate links to your website. All you had to do was leave a comment on a blog and either add your website to the comment or populate the URL field. Either way, you’d get a nice link to your website. It didn’t require much effort and over a few weeks you could add hundreds of links to your website from hundreds of different websites.

Naturally, the more people did this the more out of control it got. People were leaving comments such as ‘Great post!’ and then dropping a link to their website. Or they were putting their name down as ‘Cheap Car Insurance’ so that they’d get nice keyword rich anchor text as well as a link.

Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t really work anymore.

For a start, most blog owners are pretty wise to people commenting on their blogs and if they see anything that looks remotely spammy then it gets deleted. Also, the majority of blogs are configured so that all links in the comments field are ‘nofollow’, which means that Google will ignore them anyway.

So, no matter how much time you spend adding comments – it will have virtually no impact on your website’s ranking ability.

There are a few ‘dofollow’ blogs out there, and there are a few lists of dofollow blogs but beware, if you’re caught trying to spam them then the consequences can be unpleasant.

So when you’re commenting on blogs now, do it to add something to the conversation. If you add something worthwhile or insightful, and it’s a popular blog then you may just drive a few visitors to your website. Surely that’s far better than a miniscule push to your website rankings?

What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below!