Before the emergence of social media platforms, blog commenting used to be one of the best ways of driving traffic.
These days, most of the bloggers do blog commenting for increasing backlinks only.
Link building helps a blog to a get better Google page rank and thereby, helps in getting a higher position on search engine result pages.
One of the frequently asked questions about the blog commenting topic is “how to find blogs to comment on”.
It acts as a hindrance for most bloggers because of automatic deletion of comment spams and the nofollow rule of Google.
In this article, I am going to discuss the basic steps of blog commenting for link building as well as driving traffic.
I will explain how blog commenting and SEO are highly interlinked and why you should never ignore it again.
What is Blog Commenting?
Blog commenting is an online marketing strategy where a blogger leaves a valuable and relevant comment along with the link to his website in the comment section of a post on someone else’s website.
Only when you leave a comment that is relevant to the article on whose comment section you are providing it, the admin of the site will consider retaining it.
If you simply make a comment out of context with the purpose of leaving your link only, it would be considered as a spam and would certainly get deleted. Read what Matt Cutts has to say about blog comments – links and spam.
The comment should be valuable for the readers such as your experience, advance points on the topic, a set of relevant questions and likewise.
Why Blog Commenting Lost Popularity?
- Greed For Backlinks – Previously, Google Page Rank used to be solely based on backlinks.
Most of the bloggers misused the feature and they used to leave their sites’ links on any and every blog they used to come across.
Back then, leaving any comment with a link used to be considered as a backlink.
–> Blog commenting became comment spamming.
- NoFollow Links – Google took a step to stop comment spamming. According to Google’s Official Blog, any hyperlink with an attribute “rel=nofollow” will not be considered as a backlink and it won’t have any effect on page rank.
Furthermore, along with backlinks, Google gave importance to OnPage SEO for better page ranking.
Several anti-spam plugins like Aksimet also hit the market to delete comment spams automatically which brought an end to comment spamming.
- Social Media Platforms – Then came the social media platforms and gained popularity in leaps and bounds.
Readers found it easy to comment on social media platforms and get replies faster as both readers and bloggers stay online all the time.
The number of comments on the sites started decreasing rapidly and reached a stage where the comments on the site were only from the other bloggers seeking backlinks. The popularity of blog commenting reached a rock bottom.
Why Is Blog Commenting Still Important?
- Less Organic Reach – With the emergence of social media advertisement campaigns, the organic reach of a post on social media pages decreased.
Some reports suggest that the organic reach of a post on your Facebook business page is in single digit percent.
Furthermore, the more fans or likes you have on your Facebook page; the less would be the organic reach.
This makes blog commenting so important in this current scenario.
- Also Read – How to Get Value Out of Your Twitter Traffic
- Building A Community – Bloggers are now using blog commenting not only for link building but also for driving traffic.
The readers who comment in a post are assumed to be the loyal followers.
Thus, bloggers are encouraging readers to comment on posts so that they can form a community where the number of readers stays intact, unlike social media platforms.
- Increasing Blogger’s Identity – When a blogger is making a valuable comment on someone else’s blog which gets comments from readers, he is not only getting a backlink but also getting noticed by the readers.
When a reader who visited your blog once in the past, now sees you in the comment section of related niche sites, your credibility increases automatically.
Blog Commenting Guide
#1. Usefulness of Blog Commenting In A Nutshell
You should do blog commenting to –
- Get quality backlinks from high PR blog commenting sites.
- Establish connections with other bloggers in the same niche.
- Interact with the audience of different related blogs to drive them to your blog.
- Increase your reach and identity or brand value among your targeted audience.
- Create a loyal and active community who could be reached with every new article.
#2. What Are DoFollow Links and NoFollow Links?
Dofollow links are those links that search engine bots consider as real backlinks for ranking a website.
By default, all hyperlinks are DoFollow in nature. The more Dofollow backlinks you can get for a page or website, the better will be your Google Page rank and the higher will be its position on SERPs.
As discussed earlier, NoFollow links are those which tell a search engine bot not to consider the links as backlinks for page ranking.
You have to explicitly mention a hyperlink as nofollow such as the following.
<a href=”www.facebook.com/xyz” rel=”nofollow”> Facebook Profile </a>
Rather than turning each hyperlink as nofollow every time, you can turn all the links in a particular page including the comment section as nofollow links by the following meta tag code.
<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow”/>
#3. How to Find DoFollow Blog Commenting Sites?
There are two approaches to finding blogs to comment on – ready-made web tools and manually by identifying relevant blogs.
For the manual part, you have to use Google and identify all the sites and blogs that belong to your niche.
Then you have to eliminate all those that do not have a great number of followers by checking out the comment sections of different popular posts.
Also, the sites must have good rank. Now, the sites that you have shortlisted, you have to visit their popular posts or posts that have maximum comments.
Generally, a side widget is present in quality websites that lists popular posts and recent comments.
Blog Commenting Service –
By using popular web tools, you can do the job even better like a pro.
- DropMyLink – It is the most popular tool to find blogs from where you can get backlinks by commenting. It also helps you to find backlink providing forums.
All you need to do is to provide your researched keyword or niche and select the category you are interested in such as comment backlinks, forum backlinks, blog platforms and many such other options and get the result.
- DoFollow Search Engine – This search engine will help you to get a list of blogs where you can find relevant articles based on the keywords supplied and you can get do-follow links by blog commenting.
- SEO Quake – It is a popular Google Chrome extension that will help you to get key SEO metrics about any site that you have opened in your browser.
It is going to be helpful to decide whether you should go for a blog comment on a particular blog on not based on its rank and backlinks parameters.
- MozBar – It is a toolbar that indicates whether a particular page or blog is having nofollow link activated or not. It also provides SEO insights that will help you in deciding which blog to comment on.
High PR Blog Commenting Sites –
There is a wide difference between blog commenting for connection building and blog commenting for SEO.
For connection building, you need to comment on sites that are equivalent to your blog but for SEO and driving traffic, you have to aim at making blog comments on popular and high PageRank(PR) blogs.
The site should be in your niche and should have a recent comment widget on the homepage so that you get noticed easily.
- SocialCliff is a popular site that provides an updated list of high PR blog commenting sites.
You can also find them on Google by searching with query “High PR blog commenting sites”.
It is very important to note that if you use too many low PR and irrelevant websites for blog commenting, Google algorithm will decrease your position on SERPs.
#4. Blog Commenting Tips
Once you have found out the blogs and posts on which you need to comment, it is time to do a quality comment that the admin of the blog will not delete.
Here are the essential tips to make a top quality comment with a link to your site.
- Set Up Your Profile – While making comments, you need to use your blogger profile and not as someone anonymous or using your social media profile or email address. According to Neil Patel there are some blogging mistakes you should avoid making at all cost.
If you are using a WordPress blog, Gravatar is where your profile resides. Use your face in the profile photo. Fill up other parameters like your bio and contact information. Use your real name as display name and you could include your website name in that such as “Gaurav Jain @eMoneyIndeed”.
- Make An Awesome Comment – Read the entire post before commenting. Your comment can be something relevant to the article such as points or tips that are not covered in the post.
Your comment can be your personal view on the topic which can defer with writer’s point of view. It can also be your personal experience on the topic or a set of questions.
Try and use different strategies for different posts. Whatever you write, make sure it adds value to the readers and attract them to read it completely.
- Length And Timing – The length of your comment should be 2-4 paragraphs. Big comments naturally draw attention.
The timing of making a comment is vital. The earlier you make a comment, the better are the chances of it getting noticed.
To write the first comment, subscribe a blog and when a new article is published, you will get a notification and use the opportunity to your favor.
- Leaving Link – Most of the popular sites that allow dofollow links in comments have advanced comment widget where you can leave your comment and add your website link and it will get hyperlinked to your name.
Hence, there won’t be any headache of leaving your link explicitly. In such case, website link should be your domain name and not a post link.
If there is no system like that, you have to mention your link explicitly. Such comment easily gets considered as spam comment and to avoid such scenario, you have to adapt a clever strategy. Instead of leaving your comment at the end, you should leave it in between where it fits in naturally.
Do not leave the site link of your homepage, rather use a link to a relevant article you have on your site.
Use anchor tag to specific a link <a href=”www.xyz.com/article”> Read About It </a> rather than leaving a direct link.
You should include more than one link in your comment. One link would be your own site and the other should be popular high PR site like Wikipedia, Google Blog etc.
Blog Commenting Examples –
Here are a few perfect examples. You can also check out Quora to understand ‘how to make a perfect comment that adds more to the article posted’.
- After reading a post on blog commenting, Jub makes a perfect comment relevant to the post and he asks a few questions that should grab the attention of the readers and the author. His site link is embedded in his name.
- After reading an article Jayant leaves a relevant question. Shakir uses this opportunity to leave an explicit link that is very relevant and something that the author of the post will not delete.
Over To You
That is all you need to know about blog commenting. Do not neglect it anymore and start making comments on relevant sites with High PR and with the rise of backlinks and your site’s page rank, organic and referred traffic will increase exponentially.