Blog and Forum Commenting
So, just what is a blog comment?
Well, you have seen them of course, at the bottom of any page or article that allows comments. The neat thing is that these comments can be used to link back to your page or site. And, even better, blog sites with high Page Rank tend to provide more ‘link juice’.
Regarding link juice, remember that contextual links are best and you will want to place most (not ALL) of your comments on blogs and forums that create ‘do follow’ links. These can be most easily found when identified by their owners as CommentLuv Blogs.
Before I explain some methods for finding comment opportunities, let me go over some Blog and Forum comment ground rules.
- Leave your name! No keywords in the Name field (Yeah, I know it was a cool idea years ago)
- Comments must contribute to the discussion. (no ‘great post’ comments)
- Comments must be related to the post and show you’ve taken the time to read the post. (Hint: Use the blog author’s name)
- No inappropriate or offensive comments.
- No links to inappropriate or offensive sites. (Just sayin’)
Failure to comply with any of the above points will generally result in your comment being marked as spam and deleted.
So, in general:
- -Leave good comments-
You must leave good & thoughtful comments on a blog. If you leave spammy comments then the blog owner will delete them and they may ban you from making future comments. Join the community and contribute something. - -Be patient-
Some blogs require all comments to be approved by the blog owner before the comment shows up. Since blog owners tend to be wary of out-going links, they are likely to disapprove your comment if it includes one. But placing links is your main goal here, right? So, it may be a good idea to avoid being too obvious about it. My trick is to use a link shortening service to point to a relevant Wikipedia article or something then wait for your approval. Bookmark the page where you expect the comment to show up and revisit the page a day later to update the short link redirect with your intended link address after you’ve been approved. The nice part is that once your comment is approved, the process tends to be automatic thereafter. - -Consider Low PageRank Sites-
There is a lot more competition for the top commentator spots on blogs that have a high PageRank. So you may want to start with blogs where it’s easy to become a top commenter.
You may have to search for the list of “Top Commenters”. It is usually on the right side of the blog, but once in a while it’s at the very bottom of the blog. You may have to spend a minute searching for it.
Use Google advanced search to do typical footprint searches. Search for forums by using this footprint:
‘keyword’ inurl:forum
The easiest way to find blogs and forums that allow comments is to use those already found by other people. Once you find a blog comment somewhere, you can copy the user name (“by username2003”) into Google with “-profile” to list other blogs and forums where they posted.
Find lots of forums already located by angelaE8654 with:
angelaE8654 inurl:forum -profile
Find lots of forums already located by pj413 by typing:
pj413 inurl:forum -profile
Note that we used -profile to tell Google not to return profile links because a profile link for pj413 does us no good, HOWEVER… we can certainly create our own profile links when we signup to a new forum!
Do a Google [Blogs] search to find blogs in your niche. Here is a neat way to automate advanced Google searches. It is based on my very first internet product developed and sold more than 5 years ago. Yeah, it still works.
And, here is another nifty way to find places for backlinks.
Before we leave blog and forum commenting behind, I should point out that in days past, .gov and .edu domains were thought to carry more clout than your run-of-the-mill .com type domain. In an effort to grab lots of link juice, some marketers fell headlong into the trap of being heavy on these domains. This looks unnatural to the search engines and they will penalize you for attempting to game the system.
OK then, with that, let’s move on to Press Releases
