If you don’t know what blog comments are, they’re just comments from readers on posts on your blog.
Some search engine optimisers believe that blog comments give a small SEO boost. Of course, when SEOs talk about blog comments, they’re actually referring to 3 different types of things: blog comments on your own blog, blog comments on someone else’s blog, and, ugh, blog commenting service. In order to help you figure out if blog comments help SEO, we’re going to cover all 3 types of blog comments.
Do Blog Comments On Your Own Posts Help SEO?
This is something we’ve been unable to properly determine ourselves. From our discussions with other SEOs, some of them believe that blog comments provide a small boost to the SEO of a page whilst others believe they offer no benefit. The logic for them offering a small boost comes from the fact that it’s additional content on your page.
What we believe is that it offers a nigh negligible boost to SEO. What this means is that if you get blog comments, it’s nice for multiple reasons, but not something you should be aiming for.
We actually ran some of our own tests over the years to see what works and what doesn’t. We don’t have the details, but we the details these days, but we do have the results:
- Genuine blog comments didn’t seem to offer much of any boost in SEO, but we did find that articles across all of our websites that already traction would receive blog comments.
- Allowing spam blog comments did nothing for SEO. Some would argue the increase in outbound links even hurt the SEO of our pages, but that’s a different discussion topic for another day. Also, we found that it attracted more spam to our sites since the little nuisances who offer blog commenting services all copy each other and spam the same sites.
- Converting spam blog comments into genuine-looking ones by cleaning up the content and removing any spam links did nothing for the SEO of the pages we tested this on.
Do Blog Comments On Other Blogs Help SEO?
This was something we tested out with various websites over the years. We’ve found this whilst it doesn’t offer a real direct SEO benefit, actively discussing articles on other blogs did help drive traffic to our websites.
However, other SEOs could argue that just having the link to your website could provide some small benefit in terms of link equity link equity. Personally though, we believe that there are so many other effective strategies you could be focusing on instead.
Do Blog Commenting Services Help SEO?
Good grief, why are these still offered. No, they don’t help SEO, but we’re going to rant about these anyway.
Okay, so you know those annoying spam comments you get on your WordPress blog posts? Those are often the result of blog commenting services. This is a black hat SEO service, and whilst black hat SEO tactics generally work, this particular black hat SEO tactic does not. No, they’re a relic from a time they did work and are only offered to SEOs stuck in the year 2009. You know, the guys who still keyword stuff at the footer on the page.
We’ve tested hundreds of these blog commenting services over the years. They don’t work. We’ve never known them to work in the last half decade. They just add pointless spam to random blogs and make your website look bad. The worst part is really the people offering these services. They offer them as “niche relevant blog comments”, but then spam your URL on the same 100 random websites of different niches. The comments they leave on these blogs is just embarrassing, too: they range from pure nonsense to broken English. Just don’t waste your time with these.