Commenting Your Way to Better SEO

The volume and quality of links pointing toward your site has a massive impact on its search engine performance. Backlinks are THE most critical aspect of off-page SEO and webmasters are always on the lookout for good ways to increase their backlink totals.

One of the easiest ways to secure backlinks is by commenting on blogs. No, we’re not talking about the old (and no longer powerful) practice of “comment spamming”. Instead, our focus is on finding blogs that are thematically related to your site and placing legitimate, constructive comments on them.

These backlinks won’t produce significant direct traffic, but they can help considerably with respect to SEO. In order to make the most of this link-building opportunity, however, there are few things you need to keep in mind. Let’s run down two of them:

The DoFollow Factor. Due to past abuses by comment spammers, many bloggers and blogging platforms implemented “NoFollow” tags that render comment links far less valuable. The NoFollow tag instructs the search engine not to follow the link. Although some minor engines may ignore the directive, Google follows the instruction. Commenting for backlinks only makes sense when you’re targeting DoFollow blogs.

The Relevance Factor. Google isn’t interested purely in how many backlinks you have. Quantity matters, but relevance and quality matter just as much. You’ll get much better results if you comment on blogs that have some direct thematic relationship to your site. If you’re selling cars, there are better ways to spend your time than commenting on video game blogs, for instance.

You don’t want to rely exclusively on blog comment links (Google prefers a well-rounded backlink profile), but they can be a great way to boost your SEO efforts. Take a look at one of the many lists of DoFollow blogs and find a few places to add to the conversation!