An Honest, Creative Approach to Blog Commenting

Posted on | June 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

Countless articles have been written about blog commenting as an effective SEO technique. However, it’s not rare to find such a technique being put into bad practice, overboarding with spam. This article aims at offering creative, social-friendly advice on a efficient, non-spammy, blog commenting practice, which will not only provide long-term backlinking benefits, but also good relationships with bloggers.

Offer Advice and Constructive Debate

When you target a blog that fits in your niche and has enough authority to make a comment backlink-worth, don’t just throw a few lines about the content of the post and focus on the backlink. Provide deep, insightful advice to the blog owner, make your comment genuinely interested in the blogger’s opinions and well-being. Disagree with what the blogger said? Discuss your argumentation! Make your comment as relevant and debating as if it was another blog post. In the best of cases, bloggers will reply to your comment and engage in constructive conversation with you. Bloggers are also keen to link back freely and naturally to people they enjoy conversing with, and this could be very advantageous for you.

Share Authoritative Links

Commenting on a blog post does not involve only inserting your site URL in the URL field. The body of the comment is good to place links as well, but NOT your links: authoritative links. By authoritative link I mean Wikipedia, About.com, Technorati, SEOmoz and so on. Authoritative links will not trigger spam defenses from plugins like Akismet or other anti-spam tools, but they will add credibility to your comment. Also, the blogger will take your tips in major consideration if he/she knows you come from good sources, and begin to trust your own URL too.

Share Your Experiences

When you comment on a blog post, share your personal experiences. Bloggers like when commenters share their own views and experiences about the topic they talked about in their blog post, because it feels like a community. This is a very important social aspect to blog commenting that should never be underestimated: the more you get into human relationships, the more your site will get trafficked, visited, placed feedback on. And trusted.

Be Open to Discussion

If you only drop a comment once you are throwing a dark shade on your reputation already: bloggers are attentive creatures, they will get that notice that you only comment for backlinks and that you don’t really care about what they are saying. Instead, be open to discussion. Come back repeatedly to the same blog, comment again on new posts and share good advice (see the first tip in this article)

Do NOT Disdain Nofollow Comments

Yes, nofollow backlinks don’t pass link juice (PageRank), that’s verified. But are you really sure that they are of no beneficial use for a business or a blog? Think of Twitter: every outgoing link is nofollow’ed; however, every blogger, business or SEO seems to use it massively to promote their content. If nofollow links were of no use to anybody, Twitter would be dead a service by now. PageRank is not the only relevant factor in a link campaign: many blogs and businesses with a homepage PageRank equal to zero are not less appreciated by readers and customers. Earning people’s trust should be your priority. PageRank comes second (or third). Placing relevant, in-depth comments on blogs that apply a rel=nofollow on every outbound link will still cause reactions, replies, feedback and human traffic, all contributing to trust, credibility and authority. Don’t loose a chance to build these golden foundations of success to seek after ephemeral metrics like Google PageRank.

The Creative Bit

Blog commenting is usually performed on niche blogs, or interesting personal blogs. However, another category exists in the blogging field: Character Blogging (or Role-Play Blogging). According to Wikipedia, Character Blogs are fictional blogs where the blog owner pretends to be a certain fictional character (original or from anime/movies) and tells the character’s life adventures in first person, as if he/she was the character. SEO experts never take these blogs into account when promoting link campaigns, but these blogs can actually provide more authority than a real person’s blog, for a simple reason: everything said in a fictional blog post becomes real within the context of the character’s world, therefore blog readers will not perceive links as spammy from these sites, but as an integral part of the story. They will be curious and follow the link, to see what their favorite character loves the most about a certain service.

Creative writing online offers a new, potentially beneficial perspective to SEO campaigns. Play it well, work with active fictional blogs, seek for similarities between these imaginary worlds and your services, and you shall build relevant backlinks.

Not convinced? Think of the new Transformers movies by M. Bay: those big alien robots use eBay and the Web to learn more about the human world. How do you think the audience felt about the ‘ad’? eBay and the Web were part of the story, they were perceived as such. This is completely different from placing an interstitial ad between the first and second act of the movie. Now think of your link campaign in the same way and you will notice the similarities.

Win Bloggers’ Trust

To win a blogger’s trust, being nice is not enough. Pay attention to all tips given in this article: credibility, insight, trust, human relationship, attention were mentioned. Believe it or not, you will need all of these factors if you really aim at ranking well on search engines and on people’s feelings. That also means no keyword stuffing and no focus on keywords for themselves, but on content.

Ask yourself: “If this was to be my blog, would I accept my own comment as honest and legitimate?”. Yes, putting yourself in the blogger’s shoes helps locating pitfalls and potential risk of spamming. Also, prefer “YourName at YourCompanyName” for your anchor text: it conveys more honesty than keywords and keyphrases, mostly taken as spammy by blogging platforms and plugins like Akismet for WordPress. However, the anchor text will still carry your name and your company name, therefore there will be no loss on your behalf.

Author Bio: Luana Spinetti is a seasoned blogger who enjoys writing, drawing, computer science and SEO, as well as the spreading of multiple creative ideas to enchance the beauty of human relationships.

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