Editor’s Note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column from SEO technical experts Shelly Fagin, Ryan Jones, Adam Riemer, and Tony wright. Ask your toughest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO article!
This week for Ask a SEO, we have a question from Ed in Memphis. He asks:
“Are blog comments useless for link building?” “
If you run or manage a WordPress site today, especially one that has not enabled Akismet for spam protection, you know too well that people like to try and comment on blog posts for the sole purpose of drop a link in the comments.
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I can see how this might cause some to wonder if this tactic is an effective form of bonding today.
To answer your question, Ed, blogging comments are a useless form of link building today.
In fact, Roger Montti of the Search Engine Journal listed blog comments as one of the 18 link building tactics to avoid.
The rise and fall of blog comments for links
Blog comments were a popular link building tactic many years ago.
You might come across a lot of older information that suggests using this tactic, as it once worked extremely well.
Please listen to me when I say this tactic was working.
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This is no longer the case – and not for a long time.
Like many other popular link building techniques, this one was quickly abused.
No more insightful comments from people who took the time to read the articles and comment thoughtfully.
Instead, blog posts were quickly swarmed with inconsistent, inconsistent generic comments left for the sole purpose of linking with keyword-rich anchor text.
Eventually, spammers developed tools to automate this process, and spam comments quickly caused significant problems for site owners.
Most blogging platforms and other content management systems that allow users to submit comments have started implementing the nofollow attribute on all links added by comments from site visitors.
The nofollow tag was announced by Google in 2005 to help site owners fight spam and for publishers to use it on sponsored links and advertisements sold on their websites.
When applied to an outbound link, we are telling search engines that we do not endorse the website that this link is pointed to, and no value should be passed in that outbound link.
Google recently released new attributes, rel = “UGC” and rel = “sponsored” to allow us to further qualify our outbound links. (UGC stands for User Generated Content.)
The UGC rel attribute is for sites that allow external visitors to contribute content or post a response to content on the site.
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Another good example would be web forums.
Shortly after, WordPress announced that it would adapt the UGC rel attribute and apply it to WordPress comment links.
Are blog comments really useful?
Even though blog comments are useless for link building, when used correctly they can potentially lead to increased traffic to your website.
Within the blogging community, this is a common way to gain visibility and build blogger-to-blogger relationships when engaging with others in your niche by posting value-added comments and support for others. other bloggers.
As a site owner, user comments on your content can help improve your rankings.
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Many comments left on an article will not only signal that your content is highly engaging, but they can also provide additional valuable and indexable content that complements yours.
User comments can provide additional information about the topic of this page and are generally rich in targeted keywords used naturally in the wording.
In particular niches, such as food blogs, recipe comments usually also include the ability to allow visitors to leave a note on the recipe, a very valuable feature.
So please do not use blog comments as a way to link to your website.
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If you are looking to market yourself in your niche, I would instead consider commenting only on relevant blog posts where you can add valuable and helpful comments based on your expertise on the topic.
You may find that other readers will find your comment, find it informative, and visit your site as well.
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