Do Comment Backlinks Work For SEO?

A few years ago, blog comments were one of the main methods of getting a decent rank in search engines. Today, however, building comment backlinks for SEO purposes is always the subject of debate. Personally, I’ve always included comment backlinks as part of my overall link building process, but just how effective are they?

How To Use Comment Backlinks:

Matt Cutts (Google’s cult like SEO spokesman) addresses this type of question in this video:

“If your primary link building strategy is to leave comments all over the web, to the point where you have a huge fraction of your link portfolio as comments, and no real people linking to you, then Google will consider it a link scheme.”

At the same time Matt addresses how you can use blog comments in a productive way and highlights that a suitable amount of relevant comments are beneficial. It should be clear then, that excessive comment use is going to cause you penalties, especially if you’re commenting on articles completely unrelated to you that don’t add to a discussion.

What To Include In A Comment Backlink:

Diversify your anchor text. (For those that don’t know, anchor text is the text that the hyperlink actually appears on). When it comes to commenting on other people’s websites, the anchor text is usually the name of the person that commented, it’s why you’ll often see people commenting on random articles whose names are “cheap car insurance delhi”.

Commenting in this way can be beneficial for SEO, but having a diverse comment link profile has far better SEO results. It’s also a suspicion of mine that Google will eventually crack down on keyword ”spam style” anchor text and those who rely heavily on the process will be hit hard in the future. However, there’s no way that Google can penalize people’s names, so you can say with certainty that a well placed comment, with a relevant link, couldn’t harm your site. Indeed, this is something reflected in Matt Cutts’ addressing of the question.

How To Find The Best Blogs To Comment On:

Since comment backlinks should only be used as part of a wider SEO Strategy, it’s best not to waste time commenting on unrelated blogs or blogs with low pagerank.

Finding a blog’s page rank is incredibly easy, a quick search for “pagerank checker” returns hundreds of sites where you can enter the URL and check its rank. Alternatively, if you use chrome, you can also install a plugin such as Open SEO Stats which automatically displays page rank and a host of other useful information.

Of course, commenting on a new website with a pagerank of 0 isn’t necessarily a bad thing, becuase you might genuinely want to add to a discussion, but if you’re only commenting for purely SEO purposes, then you might as well stick to high PR sites.