Is the game finally up for blog commenting?

A lot of my links for a small site have been coming in from blog commenting. Not spamming, mind you, but just honest comments all of which are unique. (I have at least some class.)

Recently I've been noticing that I've been getting less of a boost from these comments. Furthermore, I noticed I've actually been losing a few backlinks. Nothing that really hurts me, but it the number is going down a bit.

So are search engines finally cracking down on blog comment abuse like they did meta tags, or is this just me?

 

1) 99+% of the blogs out there add rel="nofollow" to all comments so from a ranking perspective, those comments are worthless. They can, however, send you traffic if the blog you're commenting on is relevant to your site.

2) If you do manage to get links from post on other blogs or if you have managed to locate DOFOLLOW blogs for commenting, the very nature of blogs makes the benefits of backlinks from posts and/or comments short lived.

For example, if a blogger makes a post that links to your site, it typically gets displayed on the home page of that blog for a few days or weeks. While it's shown on the home page the actual post page has links from the home page, links from the category page, and archives page. So it has a good bit of link juice flowing to the post page. If the link in the post to your site makes it onto the part of the post shown on the home page then you have a link from their home page AND the actual post page.

After that post "rolls" off of the home page the post has lost it's strongest inbound link on the site - the one from the home page. If your link in the post was also appearing in the highlighted post on the home page, then you have lost the home page link and are only left with the link from the post page (and possibly the category page). So it loses a LOT of juice.

If it didn't get any links from other sites while it was highlighted on the home page then the actual post page will frequently be deindexed after some period of time. If the post page gets deindexed, then you lose all credit for that inbound link.

So SEO benefits from these types of links tend to decay over time. The same goes for blog comments, articles submitted to submission sites, and forum post.

 

Thanks Canonical for such a clear reply. I guess that in my case Blog commenting should only be used as a way o promoting your blog within other relevant bloggers, and like that make more popular yours.

Besides that I agree with canonical that the benefit of the link is barely none, so better is i what you really want are inbound links you better start submitting your site on dofollow directories.

There are lots of lists of good directories in this forum.

Good luck!

 

Yup link building is a constant battle

make new friends and keep the others old

you will always be losing links

 

yes i think so, or at least close. Many websites are adding no follow to comments and too many people are doing it, leaving comments for backlinks so it kills the link juice.

 

canonical answers the question very well; that's why link building is a daily/weekly endeavor and also to remind us that it's a good idea to get links from a variety of sources -blogs, forums, directories, similar niche sites, recip links etc, and the more different domains too the better