Does blog commenting still work?

If you're talking about manually commenting with relevant comments, on high-quality blogs, I'd say the TRAFFIC is worth more than the SEO benefit. I get surprisingly large amounts of quality traffic by doing what you just described on high-value blogs on sites like Inc.com, etc.

^ Frank is right.

When targeted correctly, these blogs are more likely to bring targeted traffic to your URL than provide any major SEO benefits - UNLESS they are on URL's with a high PR (URL - not domain), have low OBL, are dofollow, etc

Yes blog comments from quality site are still Good for a site, just remember that site content should be relevant to your site ,

You know google penguine is more strict in this regard.
So be careful while making backlinks from a blog.
Thanks

I find I get hits from leaving thoughtful relevant comments on blogs and the plus side I feel like that traffic is actually engaged traffic who may be repeat visitors to my site, however the downside is it takes a whole lot of time and effort to do this in relation to the small amount of traffic I get from it.

I often see gurus like the 2 in here stating that blog commenting has little if any SEO benefit at all. But I am puzzled about that (probably because I don't deal with a lot of competitive keywords).

If the comment is on a pr5 blog, thats relevant to your site, shouldn't that provide great link juice to your site?

Are you guys saying they have no SEO value because of where the link is? Like its in the comments section as opposed to the actual website/blog? Well if thats the case, can't you just compensate by getting more of them? =] (which imo is a lot easier than getting links directly on the site)

I ask because I do a ton of blog commenting. If I leave blog comments for my youtube videos, it seems to make a HUGE difference. When I don't do them, I need around 2-3 times the amount of views/likes/comments to rank a video.

Theres also been times more recently, where I've just done blog links with no views/likes/comments, and a few days later the video shoots to page 1. Now granted, these aren't competitive keywords. But what suprises me is these videos will outrank much older videos, with far more views and comments. If its a more competitive term, I always make sure to do both.

So I don't know. It seems that relevant/quality blog comments can have a powerful effect on youtube. Honestly. When I first started doing this, I wasn't even leaving comments on relevant blogs, and it was still helping.

I know websites are different, and much harder to rank. But I still think enough of them can have more than a little SEO value. Maybe my opinion will change once I start targeting more competitive keywords. I don't really know.

Still work and have some other benefits too! Like for example if you leave valuable comments related to your industry with your brand as a name, they will recognized you later on. It is good for BRANDING, SEO, TRAFFICS and building relationship to fellow webmasters!

Whether Google discounts these backlinks or not, you still benefit from it by gaining targeted traffic and creating a social blog circle in your niche.

Yes, blog commenting is still good. Not as good as in the past but I still do some from time to time.

I think it is working with the high authoritative sites such as YouTube and Squidoo and Hubpages I have ranked some of my Squidoo lenses using only Dofollow high PR blog commenting and it stills work until now and it's probably because Google gives a lot of trust in those sites that's why only few backlinks could push it No.1 easily unlike new websites that has 0 trust in Google eyes that's from my experience

I'll have to start blog commenting myself.

totally agree to frank! yes it has nofollow attribute but it might give you a huge traffic if the blog has a good popularity

Most blogs are tuned with a "nofollow" attribute on all outgoing links, so NO-- you won't get link juice.

BUT you will get traffic.

And the more eyes you have on your site, the greater chances you get of having people link to your site.

Stop spamming blogs with your "relevant" comments! If you are only leaving a comment to get a backlink, it is SPAM.

The thing is you need to contribute to the blog to get a backlink, if the blog is quality blog, related blog then it would really be helpful to you.

Yes blog commenting is still on the top of the charts to get backlinks and traffic as well.

Yes it is.. but think of relevant blog comments rather than irrelevant.

If you go with High PR links with Low OBL

Then definately it works and rocks ............

Yes still its works. But the main is where you placed your comment. Is it high quality and your relevant page?

I use blog commenting as a traffic method above anything else.

It works really well on popular blog posts, especially if you can get your link to the top of the list