SEO Strategy

I recently did some investigation into the suggestion that leaving comments on blogs is a good way to get backlinks to your website and thereby increase its Google ranking.  Jonathan Leger, who I refer to from time to time in this blog, has done some testing on this question, and has also recently recommended some tools that might help in the quest to get backlinks by doing commenting. His most recent suggestion is a tool called G-Lock Blog Finder.

As explained in his video, this little program lets you search for blogs by keyword. It goes out and finds blogs relevant to your keywords, tells you their PR, the PR of the actual pages it finds, and also tells you whether it is a “nofollow” or “do follow” blog. In case you’re not aware, a “do follow” blog is one in which the Google-inspired “nofollow” tag is deactivated so that links in comments actually get (a little bit of) link juice. Google has come convoluted reasons for encouraging the use of “nofollow”, and most bloggers are in love with Google, so there you go.

G-Lock Blog Finder then lets you click on the address of a specific post and it then shows that post in a window where you can create a comment (and leave your link of course.)

Now if you think it sounds just a bit anal to spend an hour or so every now and then to find random “targeted” blogs, do a cursory reading of the content, and then leave a comment for the purpose of getting a link, I completely concur. Most SEO experts think links from blog comments are, at best, of minimal value anyway, so spending any time at all generating such links seems like a pretty pointless way to waste your life away.

If these links actually were worth anything that would be a different matter, I guess. But first, there is the “nofollow” issue - which most blogs adhere to (rightly or wrongly). Second there is the question “Don’t I have anything better to do with my time?” And third you will inevitably ask “Do I really want to read this crap?” since so many blogs - even the ones turned up by a program like G-Lock Blog Finder - are little more than self-congratulating navel gazing.

On the other hand, finding relevant blogs can be a very useful exercise. Some blogs actually have very interesting content, a fair bit of traffic, and offer you a place where you can both learn something about your niche and meet others who are also interested in it. In other words, they perform the same function as social networking sites do - they let you get involved with others in your area(s) of interest.

No doubt this can turn out to be one of the most important sources of traffic to your site. Not because you have created a bunch of backlinks and have thereby improved your search engine rankings (although I suppose that may happen occasionally), but rather because you have entered into “the conversation” with others who share some of your interests, and they see some value in having a look at your site from time to time.

So I suggest you forget about looking for blogs based on the value you might squeeze out of them by leaving comments. Instead, I suggest you look for blogs that offer you useful content that can teach you something and a lively community of readers who might be interested in hearing what you have to contribute to the conversation.

To come (more or less) full circle, a tool like G-Lock Blog Finder might actually help you find blogs like this. So it is at least worth a look.

You can download a free trial version of G-Lock Blog Finder here.

Most SEO discussions about “spam” focus on the search engines - what you can get away with vs. how likely you are to get “banned”. In the case of those people trying to market using social networking sites this discussion shifts slightly to “How can I get lots of links on these sites without getting caught (and frozen out)?”

For instance, I belong to a video uploading service where it has been recommended that the same video be uploaded to the same site with some minor changes in order to multiply exposure, backlinks, etc. The suggestion is that certain things about the video be changed for each upload - the title, the tags, the description, the encoded format - but not the actual content of the video itself.

Others in other contexts have suggested that the openness and current Google-love towards social bookmarking sites can be exploited by opening several accounts and bookmarking the same sites in each account. The discussion as to the appropriateness of these practices is always “Can I get away with it?”, “Will I get banned?” This is similar to a discussion about the morality of stealing or murder focusing on whether or not we will get caught. But anybody who has ever thought about “good” and “bad” knows that there are other, “deeper” reasons why we should not condone things like lying, stealing, murder, fraud, etc.

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