Does blog commenting actually boost Google SERPs? Anyone tested this?

I don't know why people say that commenting should be done on sites that relate to your niche only. Here's some contrast to this idea:

1) Testing - watch the videos by freetraf. He runs one of those blog networks and has after numerous experiments shown that you can boost your search engine rankings for medium competition websites by getting links from only sites that are NOT related to your niche. This kills the original concept.

2) The Niche - there are lots of niches where there are NOT a lot (if any) blogs that relate to your topic. Certainly not any power sites. The best have a PR 2 on the front page...forget the blog post where you'll get the comment from. I'll take a dofollow anchor-text link to my Shih Tzu site from a PR7 page on a iPhone blog over a links from a PR0 blog post on Kelly's Puppy palace any day of the week.

When you factor in IP diversity, this is even worse. If there are only 5 blogs in your niche that are dofollow each updated an average of 15 times per YEAR, what do you do once you score a link on all of them? Go back for more non-link juice on non-authority sites? What do you do when you are playing in a niche that doesn't even HAVE one authority (PR5+) site across the whole web?

From my personal experience, how close the content relates to my sites content just isn't an issue and I get good results. The other factors such as ip diversity, anchor text, dofollow, Root Domain PR, Actual Page PR and all the other stuff that goes into it are far more important.

You just gotta ask yourself...how are all those people that were using Angela's Links-style packets getting those results when none of those sites related to each other...much less the user's sites?

So around 20% must be on blogs or what ever with a nofollow tag. Which many people seem to think are of no value. When if Google only ever sees dofollow links, how UNNATURAL would that be? You need to have SOME nofolow links so it looks natural to Google.

And you also prove the point that a link is a link. It doesn't matter if the site is relevant or not. Google doesn't pay any attention to that. Or if they do, then they pay little attention.

I am not an authority on this. This is just my $0.02. If you disagree, that is ok with me. I am not going to worry about the relevancy of a site, or whether it is nofollow or not.

And, there you have it.

Warmly,

Brandi

There's nothing much I can really add to the above "yes" responses to the OPs question, but I can reinforce their answers.

So long as the blog isn't "nofollow", then any blog comments links will count towards boosting your search engine rankings just like any other link.

Maybe Google does (or maybe they don't - I don't have the answer) give less credit for links which they obviously know can be made by anyone other than the site owner (and thus can and probably will be used for self promotion / SEO), but it wouldn't make sense for Google to outright discount any such links or even massively devalue them.

Ask yourself this: Where would a practice of totally discounting such links end? Indeed, how would it even be a sensible or feasible practice?

Given that there are many networks (Free Traffic System, SEO Link Vine, Article Ranks, Article Marketing Automation, My Article Network, etc) which can publish your posts directly to blogs and therefore give you links in the blog post body itself, that means any blog could also be a recipient of content from such a network.

To play it safe, would Google then go so far as totally discounting any links it knows are from blogs, whether that link be in the post body or in the comments section? That'd hugely reduce the effectiveness of their algorithm / system, given that potentially any blog could be a part of such a network.

To top it off, some of these networks are now capable of also publishing your posts and links to static HTML sites/pages, so Google wouldn't even be able to determine if anyone has the potential to publish posts to your site, given that your site wouldn't even look dynamically generated or capable of receiving content through such systems.

They'd have to totally discount links from web 2.0 sites, forums, blogs, and any site where there could be user generated content / user input, and given that such sites don't even have to leave a footprint on the front end (such as obviously running on an easily distinguishable CMS script or what not), it'd be practically impossible and also a very bad move.

There'd literally be very few if any sites left on the web where they'd be able to reasonably "trust" that a link is genuine and not manipulated, paid for or otherwise created as anything other than a genuine, wholehearted recommendation of the page/site being linked to.

Not going to happen any time soon, so long as Google still predominantly determines its ranking via backlinks.

It'd be like having an vote-based electoral system for politics (as we do), but then the electoral commission saying they can't count votes from people below a certain IQ (due to them not being able to make good decisions), anyone who has the potential to be "paid off" and so manipulated into voting a certain way (how would they know who that applies to?), and pretty much a million other potential circumstances in which the vote could be anything but genuinely from the heart.

As an expert who tested blog commenting, I can say that it works very well especially when you get comment links from authority blogs.

I agree with pandorasbox. All links will lead a spider to your site, even if no authority is passed because of nofollow. The more times the spiders are at your site, the better. Thus the more paths (links) to your site, the better.

I just wouldn't spend a lot of time getting nofollow links. That's what scrapebox is for.

Hi Gary,

That statement might be overly broad. There are links that I would consider not good, like links from pages that aren't indexed, especially if they are from penalized websites or extremely distasteful content.

Those Warriors that talk about site topic relevance not making any difference are correct, however this may be a bit misleading to a new marketer that interprets this to mean that backlink relevance is unimportant. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Let me explain.

Search engines technically do not index websites as a whole. They never attempt to determine the topic of a website, they are much more granular in their approach to relevancy. They do attempt to determine the relative relevancy of an individual document to particular keyword.

Google is able to determine relevancy down to the individual HTML element. For example they are able to determine which individual paragraphs are relevant and which aren't. And they are able to score the relevancy with different levels of relevancy.

Google looks at the overall relevancy of your page including how relevant and important the outbound and inbound links are. Collectively these elements combine to form your overall relevancy score which is used to rank your page in the SERP.

I believe the root of much confusion comes from the notion that search engines index and rank websites, they don't. They index and rank individual web documents (technically individual URLs). Once you understand this fundamental concept it makes perfect since why search engines have no interest in website topics. It would simply lower the quality of their search results.