i don't submit my site to directories and instead i do blog commenting even for my new site. it gain pr1 after a month. so blog commenting works for new site too.
I feel that you have just focused on the blog commenting for the link building, but this is not the right way. You should look for all the possible ways to get a quality link back. 1) Always do blog commenting on the blog, which is related to your site. 2) Start writing quality content for articles and start publishing them on popular sites ( Sites which do provide DO Follow link) 3) When ever you comment on a blog, check if it is a Do Follow blog or not, if not then search engine robots will not crawl your link and no link juice will be passed to that. 3) Start participating in different forums, make your signature, with your web URL. This way you can increase internet presence as well as get a link back. 4) Start working on Hub Pages and Squidoo. Both the sites gets priority on search engines. Squidoo, provides the Do Follow link form the starting, while to make a link Do Follow in Hub Pages you need to have your profile score above 75 and hub score above 60. 5) Start using Wikipedia. Provide unique information on different topics related to your business. Wikipedia link is not a Do Follow link, but a link on wikipedia can get a huge amount of traffic. This way users can come to know about you and if they like your information and site then they may provide a link back to you. 6) Submit your site's main URL and Sub URL's in different DO Follow Directories. 7) Always remember one thing that good quality content is alway the ling on internet, so publish quality content on your web, articles, blogs. Unique content is always picked up by other sites and they automatically provides a link back. 8) Start using different classified sites to promote your services, offerings or products. Many classifieds provides a DO Follow link. 9) Start using social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, My Space and other. You can get a huge amount of traffic as well as quality link back from these sites. 10) Start working on Social Bookmarking sites. Many such sites provides quality link back. 11) Prepare a Link Bait article and publish it on a high PR site. Link bait is a single articles where we provide all possible sort of information related to one topic, all the information is provided through links, which actually leads to your sites pages as well as to some high PR sites, government sites, educational sites and other sites. Link bait can be very useful to give a boost in the traffic as well as in back links.
I think the only thing Google can penalise your site for is zero content or sites which are 99% affiliate ads/feeds etc If Google were that quick to penalise a site then webmasters would be submitting their competitor's sites in order to get them penalised.
I am trying to build natural links to my blog as well. I find some good blogs that match my niche and take the time to write sensible and valuable posts in those blogs. I also am writing articles and submitting them to top directories. It surely does take work but if done properly, should yield some good results.
You should relax and wait for a month or so. The ranking will go up if there really is something in your site.
I finally got a page rank 2 from posting back links so it does pay off just don't do too many at once take your time.
As my personal experience,too many comments on other blogs do harm my blog.When searched "onlinecash",my blog was on the first page in Google before.But I can't find it in Google now.So if your blog if new,don't comment too much on other blogs to get backlinks.
if you can got 1000 links per day, then just keep the speed and use different text anchors, ldifferent ink types, and different pages!
I've used mainly forum posting but have started some blog commenting. I saw a lot of traffic from commenting right away, my PR has increased using both of these methods. Mark