Second Thought On Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is always cited as one of the most effective ways to promote a website. For a long time, I didn't believe that. In my previous view, the chance of the comment being accepted is quite low. The fact that webmasters have the tendency to post their comments with the sole purpose of promotion rather than providing valuable insight make the acceptance rate even lower. So, personally I wouldn't want to spend my already precious time to do blog commenting.

My bias with regard to blog commenting is completely gone after I tried it once a couple of days ago. I downloaded a free software which could search and list all the blogs that allow one to post a do-follow link together with his or her comments. To be honest, I didn't take it quite serious as I didn't believe it could have any visible impact on my link popularity. So I just randomly picked a few blog posts and posted my comments to promote 2 Submit Article, and deleted the software after that. However, the result was completely out of my expectation. I checked my website's link popularity at the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. It's quite astonishing to find that one comment I posted on a blog alone brought over 30 backlinks for my website, which constitutes a majority percentage of my total backlinks! Although the quality of those backlinks may not be quite high, the big number itself counts. Imagine you try to exchange links with other webmasters. According to my experience, out of 100 link requests, only around 10 of them will get responded, and unlike the multiplying effect of blog commenting, these 10 reponse will only be considered as 10 backlinks by Google. Therefore, blog commenting really worth a close examination.

After a thorough analysis of the blog which gave me such a large bulk of backlinks, I've summarized the following tips with regard to blog commenting to share with you so that we all can maximize the benefits from blog commenting.:

• The blog should allow commentators to post website URL along with the comment itself
• The website URL should be has do-follow attribute, or should NOT have the
  

  'rel="nofollow"' attribute

• Pick the blog that has "Recent Comments" section on the side bar. So, a recent comment will appear in every list or content page of the blog. This is what exactly contributes to the backlink multiplying effect.
• The comment is better to be closely related to the content of the blog post, so that the chance of being accepted by blog owners is higher.

As mentioned earlier, one big concern here is the quality of the backlinks. Since the backlink multiplying effect is largely determined by the "Recent Comments" section, you need to ensure that your comment will appear in this section. As the number of "Recent Comments" is limited, usually less than five, the less popular the blog is, and thus the less frequency of new comments, the more likely that your comment will appear in the "Recent Comments" section. However, it's the backlink from more popular blogs that has a much higher quality. Apparently, this is a dilemma for us webmasters, which returns to an old topic in the field of link building - webmasters need to balance between quantity and quality of backlinks.