Especially on blogs about blogging, you’ll very commonly find this as a recommendation for getting additional visitors to your blog: Find other blogs on the same or a comparable subject as yours and leave comments there. How can this strategy, usually called blog-commenting, help your own websites? Is it a good way to increase traffic? Read on to find out.

How Blog-Commenting Can Help You
There are mainly two ways in which posting comments helps your own site or blog. On the one hand, you get to enter your website URL when you leave a comment and your name in the comment will be a link back to that URL. In other words, each comment you leave on a blog represents one new backlink to your site. This is good for search engine optimization (SEO). Another advantage is that you’ll be getting those backlinks from many different places, online (different IP addresses, different geographical locations, different domains etc.). This is also a factor that is beneficial in terms of SEO.

The second factor has very little to do with search engines, but rather with actual people: People might click on the link to go check out your site. People might simply be intrigued by your comment and want to see what other stuff you’ve written.. In other words, you’ll be getting a bit of a traffic stream directly through the blogs you are leaving comments on. Of course, the more interesting and original your comments are, the more likely people are to want to check out your site.

If a blog uses ComLuv (aka CommentLuv), you’ll even get a link to your latest post, including the post title, displayed with your comment. Especially if you’ve chosen a spectacular or provocative title, this will increase the amount of people clicking through to check out an article.

So, to recap, blog-commenting can help your own site in terms of ranking and also in terms of curious visitors following the link in your comment.

Blog-Commenting: The Cons
Unfortunately, blog commenting also has some disadvantages as a link-building technique. For starters, most comments sections are tagged “nofollow”, meaning that the links in the comments don’t pass page rank. In other words, links from blog comments mostly won’t help your own site climb to a higher position in Google’s search engine results. Although there is much discussion about whether Google really discounts nofollow-links or not, it’s safe to say that you’ll get substantially less or even no advantage from nofollow-links. Even if the links are “dofollow”, they are still low-value links. Google “sees” that the links are coming from a comments section and that means that they were created by the site owners themselves. This is obviously less valuable than a link created by a third party. Also, your comment will often be one among many, so the link-juice gets diluted as it’s distributed to many sites.

The amount of comments can also negatively affect the amount of click-throughs you receive: If you comment on a popular, high-traffic blog, you’ll probably be one among dozens or even hundreds of commenters. The greater the number of comments, the smaller your chances of getting any visitor’s attention. If you’re commenting on a low-popularity blog, you may be among the only few commenters, but there won’t be that many people even seeing your comment, so once again, you won’t get many visitors.

Finally, your comment should be relevant to the post it belongs to and it should be interesting and genuine. If you simply write “Great post!” or something along those lines, your comment is likely to get marked as spam and even if it does get through, it won’t generate any interest with human visitors. In other words: Good blog commenting takes a lot of time. For it to work, you have to read the blog articles and then write something original about them in the comments. Of course, if you’re visiting blogs because you’re interested in them, this isn’t a problem at all, but if you’re trying to use blog-commenting purely as a website promotion strategy, you’ll soon find that building a few back links this way can swallow up several hours of your time.

In short, the links you can get from blog commenting are relatively low-value.

Blog Commenting Mistakes
As already indicated, you should certainly avoid leaving short, meaningless comments. As mentioned above, comments like this will often get filtered out as junk and even if they don’t they’re a waste of time. Apart from that, shallow “non-real” comments are also a bit of an insult to the blog author, who’s trying to get real people interested in his posts and doesn’t want to deal with spam.

There are many Internet marketing products that automate blog commenting or even do high-volume blog comment spamming. Obviously, you should avoid any program like this for the reasons mentioned above.

Whatever you do, never rely on blog comments alone as your SEO method. It can be a useful addition to a larger strategy, but it should not be your main thing.

So, does blog commenting make sense as an online marketing strategy? In my opinion: No. Ultimately, there are many ways to build backlinks that get you better results in less time. Leave actual comments on blogs if you truly want to interact with the blog owner and the community. That’s the primary and still the ideal purpose of comments sections.