Blog commenting

by Kay, 16 June 2012

If you’re trying to spread the word about your site, then blog commenting can help you to get noticed by more people. Most good blogs allow, and even encourage, comments. As with everything else, there are those who abuse it for their own spammy purposes. I’ve seen the word “blam” used occasionally – it’s a contraction of blog and spam. Don’t do it.

Most blog owners despise this type of spam so you won’t get very far by doing it. WordPress also has plugins to filter out the crap. Even so, there still seems to be a thriving link-building industry where people are paid a pittance per hour to post rubbish on other people’s blogs and forums just for the sake of building backlinks to whatever site has paid for these links. Bah!

However, blog commenting is not all bad. If you show up on someone’s blog and read what they have to say, you can often add value to their post perhaps by asking a question or adding your opinion. Most bloggers welcome useful comments – and if they don’t, then they don’t enable the comment function on their blogs in the first place.

Usually, when you are posting your comment on a blog, you can make your name a clickable link to your website. This is fine and an accepted practice. What makes my blood boil is when people try to kick the arse out of it by also linking to their website in the body of the content. That’s naughty and I always delete it. Again, it’s about building relationships with people rather than blindly chasing links. It’s much better if you are a useful presence on someone else’s blog rather than being perceived as that spammy link-building guy.

It’s easy to find suitable blogs to comment on – just search for them on your preferred search engine.

Stuck for something useful and/or interesting to say? Then don’t comment. Remember, each time you say something, you are representing yourself and your website. Is scoring another link so important that you don’t mind looking like a spammy idiot?

Besides, comments without any worthwhile message are self-defeating – if you make yourself look like an idiot, then no one is going to be interested in you or want to visit your website. Worse still, you made it look as if your company were so darned stupid, they hired a small army of low-paid link builders to do the dirty work for them.

Maybe building a lot of links and getting people’s backs up for SEO worked pre-Penguin but I don’t think it works now. If Penguin stops the link-building nuisance, then that makes me very happy indeed.