Why blog commenting is still in the game
Commenting on other blogs is one of the most natural ways to get backlinks to your website. Why? Bloggers long for responsive visitors who read their blogs, admire them, who engage in debates on topics for individual articles.
Blogging software (such as wordpress) is designed to facilitate communication between a blogger and his reader, so comments are the most natural interface between a blogger and a blog reader. On the other hand, blog comments are probably the oldest and most abused form of manipulating search engines results, who as we all know, backlinks love and follow.
Therefore, in an effort to prevent such manipulation of search results, Google has a long time ago introduced a number of tools to decrease (or even completely ignore) the value of backlinks from comments.
Yes, I’m talking about the hated “nofollow” attributes, which later expanded into other, derived attributes such as “sponsored” or “UGC” (user-generated content).
However, Google still highly values high-quality, authoritative, and frequently visited blogs, and therefore cannot ignore comments on such blogs, which often bring strong added value to the topic of the discussion and significantly increase the authority and quality of the blog.
Quality UGC content simply cannot be ignored, which is a fact that paves the way for smart link builders to use backlinks from blog comments wisely for their own benefit as well as to the benefit of the blog itself. This creates a win-win-win situation from which all parties involved can ultimately benefit.
Thus, instead of the headless brute force bombarding all possible blogs with their comments, skilful link builders can focus on finding suitable high-quality and authoritative blogs and building (even though nofollow and UGC) links, but with an enormous weight of authority.
About how to start a game of a proper and smart commentary so that blog owners do not start to hate us and do not send us into eternal akismet damnation, we will talk later. Today I would like to teach you all how to find such high-quality and authority-filled blogs and evaluate their benefits.
What this method requires
We will need an AHREFs account (or some group buy SEO account I´ll leave this up to you) and we will need Scrapebox. Scrapebox is not mandatory but the process will take a lot of time without it.
First find a real web authority
To find such top blog pages we first need some high authority website. You can choose some niche authority in your industry but for this demonstration I will use a general high authority website, let´s say CHICAGOTRIBUNE COM.
Let´s play with AHREFS
Launch your AHREFS, put chicagotribune in and go to backlinks. Tribune has 24M backlinks from 246k domains, to tame this amount little down we will use a few filters AHREFS offers.
First we will be satisfied with only “one link per domain” this way we are offered some 241k backlinks.
We are interested in blogs only so we will use Platforms = Blogs which leaves us with some 87,5k backlinks.
I am interested in english language blogs (73,7k) but choose your preferred language if necessary.
Now, we are looking for some vivid pages and not some dead and obscure places, that’s why we will filter only pages with at least 20 (choose your number) visits per month.
Some topics and articles attract thousands of visitors and some barely get 5 people, but we want some live traffic. And even though everyone would love to get a backlink right from the home page, let´s be honest free homepage backlinks from 90DA websites are quite rare, that´s why we will try to set the filters so that we get high authority article pages – and we will include dash “-” in the URL of the referring page. And here we are with 2235 backlinks.
You can play a bit with other filters if you want to and with ordering. I love my results filetered by number of backlinks to that particular page.
Why? I assume that pages that have many backlinks will attract even more backlinks in the future, which means their value will grow.
Pages with many backlinks also are less sensitive to any changes in quality.
Third reason is that I believe that value of the sites that link to these pages will grow over time, which results in stronger backlinks to our money site.
So.
Let us export the results now.
Scrapebox is our tool of trade now
Next, we will head to our best software friend – Scrape Box – and we will find if there are any commenting possibilities there. If you don´t have SB at hand, you can manually check every page for comment box, but it´s painful.
We will use a free SB addon called “Scrapebox Page Scanner 64bit”.
First we need to create new set of footprints.
We will click “new” at the bottom of the page and create 4 new footprints.
Note that the name of the footprint is the same as the footprint itself (its content).
Then load the URLS from the AHREFS report, and run the addon.
When it´s finished (takes some time), export the results.
You will get something like this:
Order the results and export them (or vice versa).
Now you have a list of high authority blog pages with real traffic and lot of backlinks that accept comments.
If you need just a sure shot, you can create another SB footprint – website – and run it, you will filter out all sites that accept website url in the comment form.
And that´s it. The only thing you need is to comment and create backlinks. Do it manually or automate, itś up to you. You can end up with gems like these:
Feel free to play with this method a bit and let me know your experience.
STAY OPEN-MINDED
Scrapebox is very usefull program
Yes, it is, I use it since the very beginning.