Blog commenting has always had it’s place in the tool box for an SEO. It has a bit of a chequered history, and recently (the last 2 or 3 years) the benefit they actually have to an SEO campaign has polarised much of the industry. Inherently a blog comment on a blog has a positive impact both for the blog and the commenter. They are simply to create and add a backlink. Because of this it wasn’t long before creative gurus were developing software to build comments en masse. Popular software that can do this include SENuke or GSA Ser. Quickly blog commenting gained a reputation as being overly spammy. 35,000 comment links to your site will do that!
I still use comment links all the time. IMO, it’s not if, but how you use them.
What Is A Comment Link?
Most blogs have a section at the bottom of a post for adding a comment. The foundation idea is to engage with the author of the post and interact with the blog. Inherently this is a good thing. It’s shows the blog post is quality content, people are taking interest, and interacting, and it further produces user generated content for the blog. When you add a comment, many times there is a field to add a URL, or even add a naked URL or HTML in the comment text field. When the comment, is published, it creates an inbound link to your URL. Links can be a mixture of both do-follow and no-follow, and also either be indexed or not indexed. There is a pretty good explanation here on that.
So wouldn’t it make sense that if you comment on a quality post that is relevant to your website, that it should be beneficial as an inbound link. Absolutely. I cringe when I hear people say that blog comments don’t work anymore, and will even hurt your site. Yes that can be true if used in the wrong way.
The way I used them is two fold. First I want a quality comment, then I want to build authority and trust thought that comment to my site. So the first thing is, you need to know how to find quality blog posts to comment on.
How To Find Quality Blog Posts To Comment On
You can use manual search string queries to achieve this, but it’s easier to use a free cheap tool to do this for you. DropMyLink.com is a fantastic free tool that’s easy to use.
For this example I’m using the comment software Intense Debate (the reason for this will be made clear later on, but with my strategy it’s very important). The other comment software I target in this strategy is Disqus.com. To clarify, there are a number of different comment systems that bloggers can use on their websites. Intense Debate can be targeted with DropMyLink. Disqus is not integrated into DropMyLink, but I’ll show how to find these later in the article.
How Filter The Blog Comment Urls
DropMyLink will generate a search query string in Google for the criteria you have set. Each of the URLs delivered, theoretically should have a section to add a comment, in this case using the Intense Debate system.
When I first started chasing comments, I simply used the DA and PA parameters as shown in the image above, to determine the quality of a blog post. The days I get much more granular. The blog post must be highly relevant, have some authority, and I’ll generally do a further audit for the page and site using SEMRush or Ahrefs.com. I want to know that the blog post has some quality. Another quick check is how many other comments the post has. If it has over 100 I’ll probably pass, as it can be and indication of comment spam (bad neighborhood). I want to see a few comments already as then I know the page is getting traffic and is somewhat engaging.
Adding The Comment
So if you’ve never implemented comment linking before, it’s pretty easy to assume that you just simply add the comment and move on to the next. In this example, we are only wanting to use blogs that host comments with wither IntenseDebate.com or Disqus.com.
The reason I like using these two platforms (and this is the key to the whole strategy) is that both have a profile dashboard. Just like anyother profile dashboard, you can add a heap of information and other links, plus all blogs you’ve commented on will be linked as well.
Here are example dashboards of both:
IntenseDebate.com
Disqus.com
A Disqus.com profile includes a “nofollow” URL. IntenseDebate has a “follow” tag on the outbound link to your other properties including your website.
Disqus Profile Indexed In Google
Comment Stacking
If you’ve following this post all the way through, you may of had that “light bulb” moment already. But some of you may be asking, “ok that’s great, but how does is benefit my site?”
The reason I like this strategy is firstly I can go and simply find high quality, highly relevant blogs to post a comment and add a link back to a profile quickly and easily, which then links out to my site or properties. Both IntenseDebate and Disqus are highly trusted sites in their own right. IntenseDebate.com has a Moz DA of 76, and an ahrefs DR of 64, and Disqus.com has a DA of 97, and a DR of 79.
So essentially, as you accumulate comments and start to build the profile with highly relevant content (from the comments), you end up with highly relevant, quality comment links, inbound to the profile page which is also highly relevant and trusted, which then links to your website or other properties. You could almost call it “comment syndication”, or comment stacking.
With both platforms, you also have the option to just leave your website link as you would with any other comment platform, so if you don’t want to link through the profile you don’t have to.
So in my humble opinion, I certainly don’t believe comment linking is dead. It just requires a little more tought and context. With all SEO strategies, you sometimes need to block out the noise and work it through rationally yourself first before you form an opinion.
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