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Blog commenting - Is it a bad SEO technique?
Recently, we were questioned about an SEO technique that is commonplace - Blog commenting and forum posting. So before we dive into the issue, let’s look at what this technique is. Blog commenting is the process of making comments on other people’s blog with the primary intention of generating backlinks pointing back at your own blog or website. Secondarily, it also generates “buzz” for your website and people get to know about you.
Now, everyone comments on blogs and that’s definitely not a bad
thing. However, when you spam somone’s blog just for the backlinks
that is certainly spamming. These days, there are several plugins
and tools that are available to bloggers to block comment
spam. One of the best available is
Akismet
- http://akismet.com/. These do a pretty good job of blocking out
comments that are either stuffed with keywords, not relevant to the
blog post or use a weird-looking name or URL. Another technique for
discouraging comment spam is the use of no-follow
tags (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow) on blog
comment links. These have proved quite effective as well.
However, there are other kinds of comments that are less obvious and in fact, many consider them perfectly acceptable marketing techniques. If a marketer visits blogs that relate to their website and post relevant comments on these blogs with backlinks pointing back to their sites that cannot be considered spam. Some still do. Perhaps it’s because when used as a backlink generating technique, they usually don’t just go about commenting on any relevant blog. They specifically target the ones that are popular and the posts that are related to their niche. They also try to find blogs that do not use the no-follow tag. Further, the point that really makes it debatable is that they don’t really desire to share thoughts on the blog posts and are doing it just for the sake of the backlink. So, is that spam?
According to us, it is not. As long as it is done the right way. Here’s the reason why. Television, radio and any other media advertiser tries to target their ads to the right market. Not all marketing is on TV or radio. Nike pays movie makers a lot of money to get actors to wear their apparel. Iron Man only drove Audi’s. So, is that spam? Not really. So when commenters try to target blogs and comment on them for popularity, why is that spam? The thing about do-follow. OK, that’s a no-brainer. The idea is good, but it really doesn’t help anyone that wants to improve their blog’s search engine popularity. Any who doesn’t?
Bottomline. Don’t get carried away. Remember that your blog could be spammed as well. Your competitor could use blog commenting too aggressively and beat you at the rankings race. In order for this to be a viable technique, this needs to be the same for everyone. Comment, but be relevant. Add to the content of the blog. Add thoughts, opinions or information that will be valuable to the reader of the blog post. Resits the temptation not to do so. If that makes you post fewer comments so be it. You can at least know that you are doing the right thing. That way, everone gets what they want.
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