Blog commenting is often regarded as a good way of building your credibility as well as backlinks for your blog. However did you know that your blog can lose its rankings and your reputation can go for a toss if you do it the wrong way?
Let me give you some reasons and elucidate why you should avoid relying too heavily on blog commenting:
1. Overcommenting
Posting too many comments on a regular basis can have an adverse effect on your blog’s ranking in the SERP’s as your backlinks count from comments will become too high and sooner or later Google will surely notice this and push your blog down in rankings.
This is especially dangerous for new blogs as their natural backlinks count will be quite less and Google will easily come to know that the backlinks have been created just to manipulate the search rankings.
2. Posting useless comments
I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers just visit other blogs with the intention of creating backlinks, without caring about adding anything to the discussion in the post. If you too post comments like “Great post” or “Thanks for the post” over and over again, bloggers will realize that you are only commenting for vested interests and they might mark your comments as spam, which will get your blog blacklisted in Akismet and your comments will automatically be directed into the spam folder whenever you comment on other blogs.
3. Commenting on Auto-approve blogs
Doing this is a bad strategy that a lot of bloggers seem to be following nowadays. There are dozens of auto-approve blogs out there and bloggers try to take advantage of this to make easy backlinks for their blogs. But they forget that these auto-approve blogs are used by hundreds of spammers, and there are a plethora of comments on such blogs which means they will hardly get any PR juice at all. On top of that, Google is targeting spam backlinking methods these days and these auto-approve blogs are at the top of their hit list, so your blog might also get penalized along with them.
4. Only Commenting on CommentLuv Enabled Blogs
This is also one of the most commonly committed mistakes by newbie bloggers. They only target commentluv enabled blogs to comment as these are mostly do-follow but doing this can actually harm your blog as Google will take note of the fact that only dofollow backlinks are pointing to your blog, which is quite unnatural. Hence try to maintan a good balance between nofollow and dofollow, and don’t just comment for the sake of backlinks.
If you take some lessons from the above examples and refrain from making any of these mistakes, blog commenting won’t hurt your blog in any way and you will be able to enjoy the benefits of blog commenting.
I feel with the new commentluv people are spam posting more than ever. However, at least most of the time the people actually try to add to the conversation. It is always good to get in a nice little debate. And now that commentluv is here more and more people are posting comments and it really is making commenting on blogs more fun to do.
Thanks Harshit , I agree with your points .thanks for sharing nice info
Hi Harshit,
Yes – I do agree. Especially on the last point. A lot of people and webmasters new to blogging make this mistake. When building links externally by commenting on other blog posts or websites and forums you should make use of a healthy do and don’t follow links. This is important as not to look unnatural to Google and their ever constantly updated algorithms.
Hi Harshit,
Certainly these are few harmful effects of blog commenting on your website ranking. It means we must keep balance so that blog commenting won’t hurt negatively. Do follow and No follow both links are essential for your natural link building strategy.
Yes Aasma, you got it right. A good blend of dofollow and nofollow links is essential to maintaining a natural looking backlink profile.
Very true. Commenting is not about quantity but rather it’s about quality. How much one adds to the conversation.
I really hate it when people leave comments like, great post, nice post etc without adding any value at all. Of course the spam filter doesn’t capture those sort of comment since they are authentic.
If people want to get my attention via comment then I expect “aha” moments. I’ve had several of those genuine ones too. What started out with a comment, have built up a great friendship.
Hi Harshit,
I think blog commenting is not actual thing to ruin blog reputation if people optimized there blog in wrong direction obviously it ruined the reputation with proper guideline of Google we can easily generate good traffic with blog comments mostly people use same anchor only do follow blogs during blog comment and I think because of this Google penalized the site because of web spam we had to make natural link building alternate anchor and mixed backlink effect more as compare to UN natural and spammed links.
you are totally right
even good things can become harmful if they were overused
i believe most of these are common mistakes that bloggers make
thanks for making them clear
Nice guide!! I agree with your points. As I’m new blogger but I can see commenting is best way to promote your blog.
Hi Harshit,
Blog commenting can never be harmful if done in the right way.The last but not the least point of yours that using commentluv plugin always can harm the blogger.But on the same context i am not sure that if it is harmful why are most of the bloggers still using commentluv plugin to comment on their blogs.???
Thanks Harshit, I did not realize that commenting only on comment luv blogs was bad in Google’s eyes. I am happy to say that I don’t only post on these blogs.