Have Blog Commenting Links Lost Their Value?

Last week I discussed the process of purchasing links from blogs, what webmasters who are considering buying links need to look for, and what the risks are of buying links from websites that are entirely unrelated in content. Ideally, webmasters should be working hard to acquire non-paid, high quality links from other webmasters that maintain sites that are in the same niche or industry as their own. As Google's algorithm develops and becomes smarter, acquiring high quality unpaid links has inevitably become increasingly difficult. One tactic that most relied on, the acquisition of valued links through blog commenting, may not be as sound of an approach any more.

The question that many in the SEO community are asking is whether or not blog commenting links have lost their value entirely? The problem is that over the years, there has been a drastic rise in spamdexing, in this case automated spam comments that promote something online (for example, commercial services or public forums). The purpose of spamdexing was for webmasters to increase their search engine ranking positions by leaving an inordinate amount of hyperlinks back to their site in the comment sections of as many blogs as possible. As a result, search engines began to devalue these types of links, since it became another means for black-hat webmasters to manipulate their algorithms. Originally, search engines valued blog comment links, since the person commenting was adding valuable insight or additional information to the discussion, therefore deserving of a minor "reward" - a link back to their site.

I don't necessarily agree that blog commenting links currently carry no value at all in the eyes of search engines. What is more important is what the status of your website is. If your site is ten years old, for example, and has built up a respectable backlink profile over that time period, it is unlikely that a few blog commenting links would carry nominal value. Remember, most blogs that allow blog commenting links are not very powerful themselves to begin with, so the value of acquiring a link from such a site is minimal.

On the other hand, if your site is brand new and you have very few links pointing back to it, putting in the effort to obtain a high quantity of blog commenting links is worth the effort, in my opinion. Most important, it will allow your site to be crawled by the search engine robots more frequently. If you don't have any links pointing back to your site, the robots won't find it. Blog commenting links are fairly easy to acquire and will ensure that your site gets indexed. If your site is starting off at ground level, remember that it is unlikely that you will be able to acquire a high powered link from an authority site anyway, and putting in hours on end to contact webmasters of such sites may be overzealous and a complete waste of time.