Building Backlinks Through Commenting

Taking nothing for granted let's define what backlinks are. Backlinks, (sometimes called inbound links), are incoming links to a web page or the entire website or...in English. Websites or blogs that have your site's URL address listed on any of their pages is a backlink.

These links are the single MOST important piece in determining a blogs popularity. Google's page ranking system is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page (co-founder of Google) that measures the value or importance of a web page. This value which is represented by the little green Google pagerank is the result of that algorithm.

Each time you leave a comment on a blog you're actually leaving a link to your site. Easy enough, right? Wrong. In theory it's an excellent idea but how you go about it can be all wrong.

There are several blogs out there that have a nofollow policy. This attribute was developed by Google back in 2005 in an effort to decrease comment spam.  Nofollow blogs have an attribute coded into the html code of their site...a tag...so to speak. This prevents search engine spiders from using the link to influence the link's target pagerank. In other words, commenting on blogs that have this attribute won't help your pagerank at all. A dofollow searchengine and one of many dofollow directories are available that categorize dofollow blogs.

Once you find some great blogs that are dofollow and you want to start leaving comments, make sure you follow a couple of blogosphere rules.

1. Don't Spam - "nice article" "thanks for sharing" "great post". These are all considered spammy type comments and more often than not are deleted by the webmaster.

2. Add Value to The Blog Post - Leave thoughtful comments that enhance the conversation between you, the blogger and other readers. Not only have you created a backlink, you've established a presence and credibility with others who visit there. Believe it or not...other visitors read your comments. So, if you sound like a goober, chances are you won't be getting any traffic love.

3. Comment on Blogs With High Pageranks - This should be a given. Remember we talked about measuring a site's pagerank? If Site A is more popular than Site B in the eyes of Google, Site A's links are going to be more popular and have more value as well.

4. Comment Within Your Niche - There are two sides to this statement. First of all, you can comment where ever you like. However, commenting in your niche can get you noticed. People will read your comments (good comments) and follow you back to your homepage - more traffic, more readers, increased credibility and trust.

5. Be Aggressive - Don't let anyone tell you just dropping a few comments here and there is going to quadruple your Google pagerank popularity. It takes a lot of commenting to build a substantial backlink arsenal - another reason to choose sites with higher pageranks.


I recommend finding a few really good high pagerank dofollow blogs in your niche and comment daily. If the blog has an archive and comments haven't been closed, comment even more.

I'd like to mention another way of building your backlink empire. Google loves this one - natural links. These are links you're unaware even exist. How do natural links occur? Easy. Someone visits your site and finds a post they like and decide to share it with others. They mention your post through a link in their post.

Example:  Copyblogger had a great post the other day titled 'How to Write an Article in 20 minutes'

Finding out how many backlinks your blog already has can be done by searching on Google. Type the following (adding your URL, of course) just as it appears here [link: http://your_site_.com] (don't include the brackets).

Happy Blogging!

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