This has been an age old argument. Is blog commenting an effective method of earning one way backlinks or not. Truth be told, there are many sides to this argument, however, I am going to put it as blunt as possible for all to see here. Yes, it is a very worthwhile method of backlink building, and I am going to explain to you why in just a few moments .

First, I am going to talk about having a natural looking backlink structure. What I mean by this, is having a backlink structure that resembles exactly what happens in nature. The team behind Google are very good at finding out the methods that SEO Experts use to rank their sites, so naturally, one would assume that if Google got the idea that the big method of backlink generation at the time is article marketing, then they are more than likely going to end up discounting the value of these links somehow, if a website is ranking purely based on those backlinks alone .

With that part aside, having a varied backlink structure is going to look much more natural in the eyes of Google. Lets use an example. A website that has earned 10,000 backlinks from article submissions is more likely to lose out in the rankings than a website that has varied backlinks from various sources. So, the key is to balance everything out, and earn backlinks from a variety of sources.

Now, if we head back to the various questions and debates that we see in the various forums online, I am going to have to be as blunt as possible. On its own, blog commenting is an inefficient method of generating one way backlinks, and in all cases, something that you should not focus a large amount of time on. However, earning backlinks from a variety of sources is always going to be a great idea, as such, blog commenting when used to balance out a diverse link structure is extremely effective.

So, where to now? There is something else that I need to cover, and that relates to follow and nofollow links. It is an uneducated guess that most webmeisters make when referring to the value of only generating foldable backlinks. Sure, followable links pass on PageRank, however, like I have mentioned earlier, a natural backlink structure involves a variety of backlinks from various sources. Again, as much as we may not completely understand exactly how the search engines work, the idea is always going to be to make sure that backlinks are completely varied, of different types, and so on. The same principals are applied to backlinks from high PageRank only websites.

The best practice here in all cases is to simply forget about PageRank, and completely and utterly forget about focusing only on link opportunities that are crawlable links. The idea here is to earn a combination of the two link types, as again, this appears as being very natural to Google. This is why so often, webmasters complain about this method being ineffective, because they simply chase after the followable backlinks, and their site is either slapped by Google or de-indexed, as when Google checks the backlink structure for that site, all it can see is 500 links from blog comments that are all from followable blogs that have a PageRank of 4 and above. Starting to get my drift?

So, looking back at the opening question, whether or not blog commenting is a worthwhile method of promotion, I will make the following statement. Yes, as an inclusion in your method of SEO that you are using to promote your website, this is a great method that should be included most of the time, but most definitely not overused. be sure to pick a variety of link sources and types, spread your efforts out over time, and never go too hard and fast. It is as simple as that .

Tags: blog commenting, Search Engine Optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 27th, 2011 at 11:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.