Is Blog Commenting Useless or Beneficial for SEO 2020?
If you have a WordPress website and you haven’t installed the Askimet plugin for spam comment protection, everyone knows that people nowadays love to drop their links in the comment on the blog post.
I know that some people are still confused that whether this strategy is a useful form of link building today.
And to answer this question I would say that blog commenting is a worthless form of link-building.
In fact, SEO experts who have more than 12 years of experience listed that blog commenting is a tactic that needs to be avoided in link building.
The Fall and Rise of Blog Commenting
Blog comments were a famous and beloved strategy for link-building many years ago.
You might come across lots of older information that advises using this strategy because it once worked very nicely.
Please listen to me when I say this strategy used to work.
It does not mean that still, it will work. – and has not for a long time.
Same to other older link-building techniques the blog commenting technique is also abused very quickly.
Consume were knowledgeable comments from people who took the time to read the articles and comment helpfully.
Instead, soon the spammy, generic, and incoherent comments overrun the blog commenting and remain only for the reason of link building with keyword-rich anchor text.
Ultimately, spammers design tools to robotize this process, and the spammy comments instantly generate serious problems for site owners.
Maximum content management systems and other blogging platforms started to enable nofollow rules on links added by visitors.
Google announced the nofollow tag in 2005 and the purpose was to help site owners resist spam it also helps publishers to use sponsored links and advertising sold on their websites.
When activated on an outgoing link, means we are telling search engines that we do not commend the website that this link is pointed to. And no value should be passed within that outgoing link.
To allow us to qualify our outgoing links further Google recently announced new attributes, rel=” UGC” and rel=” sponsored” (UGC means User Generated Content.)
Those websites allow outside visitors to add content or post as a response to the website content The UGC rel attribute is useful for such activity.
Another best example of UGC rel would be web forums.
Afterward, WordPress declared they would comply with the UGC rel attribute and apply it to WordPress comment links.
Are Blog Comments Effective at All?
Still, blog commenting is worthless for link building, when handle properly, it can possibly result in a gain in traffic to your website.
In your relevant niche, it’s a common way to gain traffic and exposure in a blogging community, it depends on blogger – blogger relationship when you engage with them by posting value-added comments to their blogs and supporting them in response.
Visitors’ comments on your blog or content can help you increase your ranking as a site owner.
When Lots of users left comments on your blog or content Google crawler will assume that your content is highly appealing, and it can also provide further valuable and indexable content that’s an addition and plus point to your own.
Visitor’s comments can add further insights into the topic of that page and commonly are rich with targeted keywords used naturally in phrasing.
In distinct niches, such as food blogs, the comments on recipes generally also have the ability to allow users to leave a rating on the recipe, a highly valuable functionality.
So I will suggest that please do not treat blog commenting as a tactic of link building for your website.
If you want to get traffic and gain exposure within your niche, I would suggest you that only commenting on relevant blog posts where you think that you have expertise in that niche, and try to add some valuable comment and content.
You might find that other visitors will come across your comment, find it informational, and visit your site as well.