If we go back just a few years, we might recall how search engines could be “gamed” into moving your site to the top rankings slot, and back then, one of the most common ways to do this was blog commenting.
The premise was simple: leave a comment or two on a high-authority blog while cleverly leaving your target keyword (not your company name) on the anchor text. At the time, this was a quick fix which would get you high quality links by the dozens.
However, over the course of time, things have taken a different turn, especially since Google has been keeping pace with these practices and has become much smarter in the process.
Does Blog Commenting Still Count from an SEO Perspective?
From a strict SEO standpoint, you may not benefit too much through blog commenting. Despite the fact that you may be strategically picking off high-ranking blogs one by one and leaving comments, you might not get much in return at the end of the day. If anything, you may be doing more harm than good, thanks to Google’s algorithm changes.
In the old days, links coming from blog comments were considered irrelevant to the theme of the blog and with good reason, because this was done only for SEO and link-building purposes. And this is one major reason why links coming from blog comments eventually lost their significance.
Today if clever and highly relevant blog comments bring more visitors to your website, they can certainly be contributing factor towards improved search engine standings. So on one hand, blog commenting may not correlate directly with SEO, on the other, it can indirectly be used to leverage better search engine rankings. And when we say SEO, we’re pointing to your website and not your blog’s SEO. Being said, if you leave relevant links that point to your blog when you leave comments on high-ranking blogs, your blog SEO can be enhanced as well.
Can Blog Commenting Compliment My Marketing Efforts?
When we talk online marketing strategies, the goal is largely the same as any other business in your competitive pool: to gain as much high-quality and relevant traffic to the company site as possible.
Since you may or may not get a lot of SEO value from leaving comments on even the highest ranking blogs, you need to find ways of gaining dense traffic to your site through non-SEO means. First, shortlist the blogs that are generating the most clicks, then turn your attention to converting prospects into customers and email subscribers.
So from a conversion perspective, blog commenting can indeed complement your online marketing efforts. If you see traffic coming from one blog being converted at a significantly higher rate, then your work is cut out:
- Keep leaving comments on that blog until it no longer yields fruitful results
- List key traits of that blog, scour the same niche for other blogs that match those traits
The beauty of blog commenting lies in the fact that it can lead to a lot of visitors that might convert, particularly if they are ‘qualified visitors’ in your target niche.
Matei Gavril, CEO at PRMediaOnline says, “Blog commenting is a technique we regularly use, but not to improve SEO but to increase conversions. Comments can be used to inform users about a specific product or service, resulting in them clicking on the given link. This increases conversion rate since only users that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer would click on it.”
Remember to be completely transparent about what you do while commenting because you are introducing yourself to a new prospective audience, without linking to your business directly, which can lead to a lot of traffic and conversions down the line.
The Bottom Line
It’s fair to say that blog commenting may not have the same significance it had a few years back, and this will probably hold true for many years to come. After all, there are no visible signs that Google is going to reverse its algorithm updates just to add blog commenting to its list of “fair SEO practices”.
On the upside though, what we’ve just discussed makes it clear that under the right circumstances, blog commenting can work wonders for website traffic and eventually, conversions, without affecting your organic rankings. And from an online marketing perspective, you’ve got nothing to lose by revisiting the idea.
