Blog Commenting
A popular way of getting traffic is to start getting back links from the thousands of blogs out there. Some of these have high PR and so pass reasonable link juice towards your site. The way you do a blog commenting strategy is by commenting on the article that the author has written. Within this comment you place a link containing your anchor text back to your website.
This once novel idea has become ubiquitous, resulting in mass spamming of blogs. There are numerous programs out there — such as Scrapebox — that can help you spam these blog comments. This personally goes against my philosophy, but many people do this nonetheless. Blog owners want to comment on their website that are related to the article they have written. Spam comments tend to be generic and do not add any value to their article. The spammier the comments the less likely your comment will be authorised to show on the blog.
Getting traffic through blog commenting is effective because they are one-way links. Gone are the days where reciprocal links provided value. This form of manipulation was obvious and easy to detect using an algorithm. Blog commenting is a one-way link and is legitimate in many ways. How is Google to know whether the one-way link is a genuine link rather than one manipulated by search engine marketers? It is more difficult to detect the manipulation with a blog comment.
The onus for moderation of blog comments falls on the blog owner and so Google to some extent relies on their judgement over whether the link should be authorised for showing on that particular webpage. It is a kind of delegated decision-making that Google docs in this instance. So getting traffic from blog commenting should be considered less risky than other forms of backlink manipulation.
Please not forget that the link within itself will have readership to. So if it is on topic, then you may well be getting traffic via the link itself and not just its influence on your search engine rankings. I think all too often we forget that people arrive at our websites via other means than Google and the like. Just think how many websites you visit to find information and then squirt off to another website because you say to yourself, “That looks interesting — let me take a quick peek!”
For me personally, I find this part of researching for information on the Internet a real problem! I try to stay focused yet end up bookmarking a whole load of websites that are linked to from the particular page I originally visited. The same applies to blog comments. Quite often I find that when I read an interesting blog article, the comment sections add great additional information and website recommendations. Essentially, when using blog commenting for getting traffic all you are really doing is supplying value added information to the author’s article which will help readers benefit.
The challenge is in finding relevant websites that could appreciate your blog comment as a genuine attempt at adding value rather than spamming their blog. There is a big difference between getting traffic by adding value and spamming. The spamming root involves creating generic text such as, “Loved reading your article. May I use some of its on my own website if I link back to you?” The spammer hopes that leaving a generic comments such as this will help it pass moderation because the comment is a form of flattery and promises to provide a link back to their website. Sadly bloggers realise this is a scam and delete your comment.
Tags: Blog, blog commenting, blog comments, comments, search engine marketers, Search engine optimization, search engine rankings