Although I don’t discourage comment linking as you can see from my comparison between comment linking and comment spamming, I had an interesting change happen to one of my websites while practicing this link building strategy. I may be making several assumptions in this post, but I believe the overall takeaway will be valuable.
The Strategy:
When I decided to do some blog comments for my website, I purchased very valuable software that would go out and grab blogs based on their topic. When I went out to those blogs, I left a valuable comment that I believed was worthwhile and used a name as the title (not keywords).
The Problem:
Where did I goof up? Well you see, when you have that many blogs in front of you that you can so effortlessly go through and comment on, it’s easy to get carried away. It’s not that I was leaving spammy comments full of links and keywords, I think I simply did too many in a short amount of time. How many did I do? Well, I’m not quite sure on the actual quantity of blogs that I left a comment to, but my Yahoo link count went from roughly 1000, to roughly 1700 in about a week. Don’t be confused, I didn’t go through 700 blogs, Yahoo was just indexing pages where my link was visible in the sidebar or footer. Why is this bad? While it’s great to have lots of links, getting that many in that short of time can throw up a red flag to the search engines.
The Repercussions:
This is where I’m making assumptions but because I don’t know the details of Google’s algorithm, I feel somewhat justified jumping to this conclusion. I do believe that my blog commenting caused my drop in rankings. About a week after I had started with that commenting software, my rankings dropped. Badly. It wasn’t because of the commenting software and it wasn’t necessarily because of the quality of comment I was leaving. It was (I believe) the number of links that got indexed in a short amount of time as a result of my burst of blog commenting.
The Takeaway:
If you are questioning whether blog commenting works to brand your business or increase your search engine rankings; my answer would be yes. However, I also believe that too much of anything is a bad thing. I know of several different businesses and websites that comment on blogs for the sole purpose of increasing their rankings and it absolutely works for them. Just provide valuable input to the discussion and spread out your commenting over months, not days.
If you have already experienced the same problem as me, don’t worry. You can wait for the search engines to work out the duplicate pages/comments that it indexed or you can directly contact the webmaster of the site you commented on. Currently my problem site has dropped down to roughly 1300 links and has gotten back on the first page for my targeted keyword. It’s not back to normal, but it’s getting there!
One Comment
Kevin, I love that you shared your experiences. Too many people don’t pass on their negatives, and only put forward their positives. When this happens, people don’t learn. I will be sure not to repeat your mistake.
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