Friday, June 4, 2010

Proper Blog Commenting

Today I have received my first comment on this blog, and although I would not usually let this type of comment through my moderation, I figured it would give me the perfect opportunity to illustrate to you the difference between proper blog commenting and comment spam.  

See, this person has broken all the rules in my book as to how you should use blog comments to help your website, because truly that is what we as bloggers are going for.  The problem with that mentality is many people pay very little attention to the comment in which they are actually commenting on.  This person was just looking for a juicy backlink, and in the process, really made a few big mistakes.  He just happened to luck out a little today when I decided to let it actually pass. 

The Comment was posted on my weekly recap, and as you can see.  He totally went straight for the jugular and stated that he heard this was a good place to get a backlink.  What? Really?  It that what he was really told?  Because backlinks that you will get from commenting on this blog offer very little value at this moment, if it is not on topic!  My comments are set to Nofollow, meaning he gains no PR juice from me, and with very little traffic this blog is seeing so far, he is NOT going to receive any traffic to his site through the link.  And it is not just because I have no traffic, it is also because the site has NOTHING to do with the topic we are talking about here.  And he took no time to try to spin his comment to make it look like he was relating it to our topic.
All big NO-NO’s.  Most bloggers would never do this.  Not unless they were real beginners who have not taken the time to really learn proper blog commenting.

Let me break this all down for you as best as I can. 

Starting from the beginning, why is it important to comment on others blogs?
Because it creates awareness, it shows the other readers of that blog that you exist, in many ways it is a first impression.  For both the readers of the blog AND the author of the blog.  What you write within the comment should be relevant and add perspective to the article.  Remember people, first impressions.

See a lot of people only comment to create a backlink.  But there is a big flaw in this mentality.  If all you are trying to do is impress the search engines with all your backlinks, then you are barking up the wrong tree.  Most of the comment sections within most blogs out there are NOFollow.  You may not know what this means so I will give you a brief idea of what NoFollow and Dofollw mean.

NoFollow links are backlinks to your site that are labeled in a way that tells the search engines not to follow them.  Some search engines do not follow this rule and will follow the link, BUT, this link carries no real value to the search engine.  Even if you comment on a blog with a great page ranking, none of that juice is passed onto you for your page ranking, so, Nofollow has little value, other than to find new readers from other blogs.  It is a way to generate traffic, and it is something to be practiced regularly.

DoFollow links are backlinks that carry value to the search engines.  If you establish dofollow links on high page ranking sites, your page ranking will be effected, you get a little bit of their “Link Juice”, These links are key to raising your own page rank, but are not as easy to come by as the nofollow links.

And it is all for good reason.  Originally all links were followed.  Back in the day every link carried value to it, but what happened is spam, lots and lots of spam.  So, to combat that, the nofollow/dofollow tags were added to blog comment sections, because these were the biggest culprits to the spam that the search engines were finding.  But in turn.  Many websites have picked up the nofollow tags for links.

Rambling, I know.

Back to my point anyway.
So, it is important to maintain a high standard when you are commenting on others blogs, because you want to leave a good impression.  It is also important to make sure you are commenting on blogs that are relevant to you own personal blog.  People seek out topics to learn something about that topic and are not usually interested in running off to a site that seems to have nothing to do with what they are learning at that very moment.

Like I have said before, Blogging is a community.  Readers and writers alike read blogs and tend to gravitate towards that style of website when seeking out information.  Blogging has a very unique ability to stay current, due to the fact that the best blogs are blogs that are constantly being updated with new materials.  It is what makes us special.  Blogs always offer the possibility of offering new perspective.

So, can you see now how that persons comment was almost useless.  Luckily they didn’t waste much time on it.  And luckily they happened to comment on a blog that talks about topics such as blog commenting.  They really lucked out, but it will not happen again.

This is not to say I do not welcome comments, far from that in fact.  I would like to see my readers comment and add a link back.  Just remember that I am no follow and that if you want to generate any real interest with that comment, it better be worth our time.

Now, being that I am a blog about blogging for beginners, you may ask, how can I comment on this blog?  My blog is about…________ (fill in the blank).

It’s not so difficult.  In that case you are going to create a comment that expresses the fact that you think I am wonderful and I have taught you so much and have helped you improve your own blog, _________(fill in the blank), and would appreciate if I took a look.  Maybe ask for a pointer or tip.  Something along those lines.

Mask your primary goal with complements!!  I feed off them.

I hope this helps illustrate the importance of "proper blog commenting".  I am sorry I had to make an example of this person just trying to establish a backlink, but, if they had taken the time to learn a thing or two, they would never have commented.

1 comment:

  1. I've recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time & work.

    ReplyDelete