Welcome back, this week we are going to dive into the topic of Blog Comments and Forum linking. Last week we talked about directories, and how you can still benefit from them if you use them correctly. Blog comments and forum linking are very similar, meaning that some SEO’s think they are completely worthless while others swear by it. The simple answer is they can work very well for you if done properly, or they can do nothing for you if done hastily or without a structured approach.
Blog Commenting:
Blog commenting can be very powerful for you if used properly. What I mean by this is to make sure you find blogs related to your website’s industry, you don’t want to visit a blog that is about auto insurance and make a blog comment about health insurance. Give the author the benefit and read through the topic, this also helps in your blog comments in the way that you don’t come across as spam. When you do your comment don’t just do the normal “great post” and leave it at that. That is a quick way for you to get rejected and/or your comment thrown into the spam box. Make an effort and comment about the blog post. It is a good idea to use examples from the blog post before throwing your link in there.
I tend to not even put a link in the actual content of the comment and instead rely off the profile name I use. I try and use a name that will not appear spammy while at the same time trying to utilize the link text I am going after. For example a blog post about server racks, I might use the name “Server Rack Dude” or something similar to try and still utilize the keyword “server rack”. Be mindful with what keywords you want to target inside you blog comments, if it is a keyword that page itself is trying to target you run the risk of the Author or the blog owner changing your name and or removing your link all together.
Forum Linking:
There are two types of forum linking: placing your link inside a forum sig and placing a link inside the actual forum post. Forum sigs yield you more links altogether depending on how many posts you have on the forum. Links inside your forum post however will only yield you the one link.
Forum Sig Links:
This is a great way to get a ton of backlinks, if you have 100 posts on a forum and in your sig you have a link back to your site, you will gain 100 backlinks (as long as the search engines are picking up the forum posts). While this may seem great in reality you really are not getting all that much value, you get an initial amount of value for the first link the search engines pick up, but each link after that only provides a fraction of the value of the first link. Remember it is better to have many backlinks from unique domains instead of many backlinks from one domain.
Links inside Forum Posts
Like I stated above this will yield you only one backlink. This backlink however can be and will be much more powerful than a backlink from your sig, if used properly…. What I mean is that if you are going to do a link inside a forum post, make sure the forum topic is what your site is about; don’t throw your entertainment site link in a post about food recipes. It won’t help you as much and you run the risk of being suspended or even banned from the forum and your post getting deleted. Similar to the blog comment make a post that is concise and helpful to the topic.
The problem with both blogs and forums is it can be very difficult sometimes to find what blogs and what forums will help you over all. There is no set list of specific do-follow blogs or a list of forums that search engines hit frequently. You can find some lists around the internet of do follow blog lists but they may not be accurate. I would recommend going out and looking around; if a blog post is specific and well written post a blog comment, if there is a forum that sparks your interests post on it.
That’s it for this week’s section; stay tuned next week for one-way links and reciprocal links.