I’ve often read that by commenting on other blogs you can build backlinks for your site which pushes you higher in search engine rankings. The three recurring tips I’ve come across make it absolutely clear that these are tried and true steps one should follow in order to achieve the greatest possibility of comment backlink success.
1) Comment on blogs that have posts similar to your own
This seems like sensible advice. I’d assume you want search engines to recognize that your website has similar keywords in common with the site where you’re leaving your comment. I would think that a link having similar keywords would have a a higher chance of being relevant and trusted over sites with no matching keywords.
Finding relevant blogs has been one of my biggest challenges so far. This site talks about open source and commercial software from the non-programmers perspective, but the usual blogs relating to open source software are usually highly technical and code related. Perhaps I’m an anomoly which could be both a good and bad thing, but I definitely need to broaden my searches for blogs similar to my own.
2) Comment on DoFollow blogs.
DoFollow blogs are the ones that allow the website link in your name to be picked up by search engines. The reverse of this is obviously the NoFollow blogs that prevent your comment link from being influenced by their site search engine ranking.
From a webmaster perspective, I don’t see the big deal either way if all comments posted to your site need to be approved prior to going live. However, if you’re the one commenting, I suppose there is always the possibility of visitors clicking through to your site regardless of NoFollow or DoFollow link settings, but why not go for the search engine benefit at the same time by sticking with NoFollow sites.
3) Leave genuine comments relating to the subject matter.
Even if you leave comments all over the place just for the possibility of getting those curious comment clickers to visit, you won’t have much luck retaining visitors if your site is unrelated. Your political opinion blog probably won’t see much benefit by those comments you left on that Beanie Baby collector site you visit. Commenting for gain should be saved for sites with a similar themed site as your own.
How do we find keyword relevant DoFollow blogs to read and comment on?
As I mentioned before, randomly searching for similarly themed blogs as my own has been arduous, but at least there are a number of resources that help in finding DoFollow sites. This helps narrow the two pronged search into one. Just by searching for the keyword phrase “DoFollow sites” I found a number of articles and posts with lists relating to DoFollow sites. Apparently there are also a couple of FireFox add-ons that will help locate NoFollow links by highlighting them on a page.
The one site I found that I wanted to briefly mention is called FastBlogFinder. It’s an excellent way to find blogs related to your niche by reporting on whether it’s DoFollow or NoFollow, the site PageRank, how many outbound links it has, and when the site was last updated. There is a free version but unfortunately it is limited to only fifty blogs for each keyword. I think a lot of sites might be able to find a ton of new blogs to post to with just the free tool, but if you find you’re having trouble locating quality blogs that relate well to your own, or you want to aggressively grow your backlinks, you may want to give the Gold Edition a try.