Blog Commenting: Achieving Links Through Participation

On a daily basis, we clear out dozens of spam comments that are caught by our very basic WordPress spam filter. these comments are either so blatantly obvious due to the lack of English written, or they’re peppered with links. Every comment that doesn’t get caught in that spam filter, we read through, and if it adds anything useful to the post or is asking something we can feed off of and respond to or better yet, make another post out of, then we approve it. Regardless of whether they’re using the name category to provide anchor text for their link.

The average blog owner follows this same method, meaning that if you can formulate anything intelligent in a comment response, as long as your name category isn’t something outlandish, offensive, or irrelevant, you’ll most likely find your comment is approved.

Now the benefit of this is far reaching. First, we’ve got the initial fact that you now have a one way link from a post to your website. That specific post may be old/popular enough to have page rank already and it could even be a dofollow link, but even if it isn’t, it’s still valuable. As long as some part of the website is ranked or not delisted, a search engine bot has made it’s way through their and has found the outgoing links. A nofollow link simply indicates that the bot won’t make a trip to your site on that link, but if that link destination has already been crawled, it notes the anchor text and attributes it to the relevancy of that page in the search engine results page. Ideally, you’re aiming for that high page rank, low out going links, dofollow post, but any accepted post is still valuable.

Second, consider that there are in fact other readers of that blog. If they find your comment interesting, they’ll surely click over on your link, hoping for more relevant content. This increases your traffic and might even land you some dedicated readers.

Third, many bloggers have top commenter or recent comments sections on their page. One site I commented on had an overall high page rank on the post and the main page, yet didn’t have a lot of commenters. A check through Yahoo Site Explorer a week later showed results for several hundred links from that site to my site. The reason? I was still in the recent comments area, leaving me an outbound link from everywhere, including his high page ranked main page.

But how can you find the right blogs to comment on? Well, in the purest approach and most true to your site, you’re hopefully monitoring sites within your niche and reading up on them as often as you can. Participating in those sites can add a lot to your credibility, especially if you become a regular and post useful information. But if you’re more interested in spreading out your reach, or perhaps simply less equipped than you should be for your site to bloom, you have a few options.

Programs like Comment Kahuna allow you to search based on keywords or relevant terms to find blogs that are closely related to the content of your website. It even displays whether the website is a dofollow or a nofollow blog. Anything that it doesn’t see a comment for throughout the site, it’ll leave up to you to find out about. This can be a pretty powerful tool, but keep in mind, several thousands of people are using this same software that follows an algorithm to find these sites. Eventually, you’re going to run out of sites, unless you decide to continuously post on them.

Another alternative would be to search: “keyword” + blog. This should yield results for you to pick through and rate for yourself. If you need an easy way to determine if the pages are dofollow or nofollow, install SearchStatus for FireFox and enable “Highlight NoFollow Links”.

Both methods will yield your desired results, it just depends on how much effort and how much success you would like to see out of it. Of course, the more manual you go, the higher your success rate.

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