When a business friend offered to host a blog for me at no charge, it was an offer that I could not pass up. This generous offer led to the development of the Internet Marketing Remarks blog. A side benefit of starting a blog from scratch is that it allows for testing of SEO tactics with a clean slate.
The first strategy to be tested was to determine if focusing exclusively upon blog commenting is an effective SEO strategy for a new blog. While my conclusion is based on a sample size of just one blog, and certainly can be not be considered definitive, I think I have reasonably strong evidence that blog commenting alone does not work as an SEO strategy for a new site.
Do not get me wrong, I am a big fan of blog commenting. However, it does not provide sufficient benefits to be a productive use of time from a purely SEO perspective. I am not going to delve into all the benefits of blog commenting as a traffic building tool as it has been exhaustively summarized in the comment thread on a Copyblogger post.
The following are caveats to the conclusion that blog commenting is not a productive use of time for SEO:
1) Interest grabbing comments in blogs that allow inserting links within the comment body or in the author profile lead to clicks to your site. However in order for this to work from an SEO standpoint, a visitor that discovers your site via a link in a blog comment: A) has to appreciate the blog/site enough to deem it worthy of link; and B) has to have the capacity or authority to upload hyperlinks. At least in my experience, this does not happen very often.
2) I did not test the results of commenting on do-follow blogs. The results may have been different if I had hunted for do-follow blogs, which do not include the no-follow tag that is specifically designed to signal to the search engines not to pass on link authority. My blog commenting was limited to interesting articles to which I could add meaningfully to the thread. I really truly was attempting to add value, not just testing out a tactic for manufacturing link authority .
3) Google indexes blog comments. So your blog comments may turn up in response to search queries, but only with links to your comment and the site where you posted the comment. No link authority is passed on to your own site.
An ephemeral benefit of blog commenting is that it can lead to impressive looking results on Yahoo Site Explorer. If I was duplicitously trying to impress a client with all my activity on their behalf, one look at the stats would demonstrate that I had been busy. As shown below, I have generated 119 in links to Internet Marketing Remarks according to Yahoo Site Explorer.
However, digging a bit deeper by reviewing SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools tells a different story. Both are reporting zero link authority is being garnered by the blog comments. The Open Site Explorer report is shown below.
Conclusion
The key learning is that all my blog commenting activity on no-flollow blogs seemly has not produced an iota of link authority. The no-follow tags are working so that comments are not being given any weight by the search engines, at least based on the Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools reports. However, this only means that these blog comments have not been productive from the standpoint of building link authority. Responding to an interesting blog article with a well thought out comment: 1) provides pride of authorship; 2) connects to the community that reads and comments on the blog; 3) establishes credibility, 4) and leads to some click thru traffic. These are all good reasons to participate in blog commenting. However, from solely an SEO perspective of manufacturing link authority via submitting comments to no-follow blogs, it is an inefficient tactic. And on the other side of the coin, as the moderator of a couple of blogs, insipid blog comments submitted solely to try to garner SEO benefits have zero chance of getting publsihed on my blogs (which are of course, no-follow blogs).
