Special Topic: Why Blog Commenting Doesn’t Work

With all the people still commenting on blogs in an effort to publicize there website, it seems appropriate to address this topic. Blog commenting simply isn’t a viable way to publicize your website.

Blog Commenting’s Origins

What is blog commenting for? It’s for interested blog readers to voice and comment, opinion or discuss a blog post that they found interesting. However, Google changed their search algorithm so that backlinks matter and comments on blogs have links back to the commenter’s site. So the result was that people started commenting on other people’s blogs to get backlinks and juice their PageRank.

Change in Google’s Policy

Google obviously caught onto blog commenting and created the rel=”nofollow” tag. What this tag does is that it makes it so that whatever link contains that small bit of code doesn’t get PR for the link. Supposedly the bot won’t follow the link either, but experimentation shows that the bots probably still do.

All the major blogging software including Wordpress have implemented this nofollow tag so basically ALL blog comments don’t provide you with any PR (PageRank). Note that even if they did, the PR would be divided among hundreds of comments so the boost wouldn’t be very big anyways. Read Understanding PageRank to know more about division of PR.

So Does Commenting Help at All?

It does help. If you write some interesting comment or observation, people will wondering where you’re coming from and will naturally click on your name, which should have a URL to your site if you signed up and added your site’s URL.

You need to be realistic though and realize that on blog posts that actually can give traffic, there will probably be hundreds of comments and your one comment may generate the interest of maybe one or two people unless you’re lucky enough to be above the fold. (Above the fold means visible upon loading of the page. It’s not likely to happen unless the article is super short.)

So in conclusion, comment on blogs when you truly have something worth saying and perhaps it’ll help your site as a bonus. However, don’t comment simply to get traffic to your website.