This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ which comes from one of the top agencies in the field.
In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.
If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.
I've ranked quite a few sites with variations of this exact technique, so I'm not quite sure where the idea that these links won't benefit you is coming from. I absolutely respect your opinion though and do agree that reaching out to influencers and engaging them is a big big deal.
This strategy is simply a component of an overall outreach and SEO campaign for any product. It very much needs to be mixed in with a variety of other techniques for full success.
The reason I shared it was because once you spend the hour or so to set everything up, you can sit down each day with your cup of coffee and spend 15 minutes building some links while interacting with the community in a very easy way. Mix that in with more specific outreach and you have a good strategy for growing exposure to your product.
It's very likely what you did made ranking a correlative rather than causative effect. Most of these comments were probably no-follow, and even if not, devalued b/c below the fold - reasoning: the Reasonable Surfer patent -http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer...
I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.
While I don't condone the methods posted in this case study, I think that it goes to show that no-follow links do have value, that your on-page doesn't have to be perfect, and that the types of links that you claim don't work actually do.
Their "Backlink Bomb" provides "50,000+ backlinks from 10,000+ websites powered by 120+ content management systems and not a SINGLE blog comment."
Sounds like blog comments aren't the way to go.
They also advertise this service as "Penguin safe." Maybe if you launch your site between algorithm updates. You can definitely rank with these kind of links, but you will get torched eventually. This is not a long or even medium term strategy for what most of consider a startup.
Great advice. The days of quick spammy links are way over. Now posting a link on someone's blog for obvious SEO benefits is just tacky, and will get LESS people to link to you.
Organic is the key word here. Make links with people not websites.
There's nothing spammy about leaving a genuine comment on a real blog. This method simply automates the collection of possible blog posts to post on, there's nothing spammy about it at all.
I'm not a fan of blog commenting for link building. Most blogs use nofollow on the comments links, and that makes them near worthless (except on very high traffic blogs where comment links send meaningful traffic). Moreover, many blog comments are spam. You don't want to be sending the same signal as spammers to Google.
What I do like about this strategy isn't even mentioned about the author. Blog commenting can be a great way to start a conversation and a relationship with a blogger. Once you've done that, then you can get some real links instead of the crappy links in the blog comments section.
I briefly mentioned your main point, regarding starting a conversation and really getting involved in the community. This strategy is absolutely focused on quality over quantity, I outlined it the way I did just so people could follow it and gather a lot of possible sources of blogs to try and comment on.
I really like the way that you outlined the technical tips for implementing the strategy, but I think that you shouldn't have made the post about getting blog comment links.
30 minutes a day is a waste of time for blog links. Even if you get 10 a day from dofollow blogs, the ROI is very low. However, if you take the same strategy and get 1 blogger to blog about you every month, then there's a much better ROI (as long as it's a decent quality blog).
The bigger issue here is with Google's Penguin update. Building low quality links can now hurt you. Blog comments are a perfect example of low quality links. There are all kinds of automated software packages for spamming blog comments with links. If you do the same thing manually and in a high quality way, you're risking a chance that your link building footprint will look similar to a spammer's-- at least in Google's eyes.
As someone whose site is just climbing out of Panda (thankfully not Penguin), I would probably choose not to link to my site if I was going to start commenting on blogs at a large scale. I'd just focus on the relationships.
I've been doing active (and oftentimes aggressive) link building for a few years now, I guarantee that this method is safe. I do agree that a judgement call needs to be made when choosing to comment on a blog post to make sure that the quality of the post and site is up to standards.
Honestly, if someone asked me how to get a lot of links to a site, I would not tell this method. If you want a lot of low quality links, you need to be automating heavily. This strategy isn't meant for low quality links.
Just because there's software out there to automate blog commenting doesn't make all blog comments bad. A good comment on a good popular post is gold.
If you're building a business in the SEO industry, you probably shouldn't throw around guarantees like that.
I think that this method is probably safe, especially if you the target site has a decent number of higher quality links. Still, it does come with some risk.
It wasn't long ago that Matt Cutts told us that duplicate content was ok and that Google would find the canonical version on its own. Then Panda came along. It was a widely held perception that incoming links couldn't hurt you. Now we know that they can.
Google's algorithm is a moving target, and it only seems that they will get more aggressive on discounting or even penalizing links that aren't given editorially.
In my opinion this works only for products and services with an existing demand, i.e. in the worst case a copycat product, in the best case a product solving a very explicit problem. If your product/service is relatively innovative (i.e. for example 4square in their beginnings) and there is no explicit demand existing, these strategies won't help that much at all.
Even if you have an innovative product with no existing demand, there are still blogs/communities that this strategy will work with. What is the more generic vertical that your product is in? In 4square's case, they could hit anything mobile based, social network based, or people doing geo-based mobile development.
Blog Author here: You're right, I agree. I tend to write posts targeted at founders who are building problem solving products, not the foursquares and twitters of the world.
I think in limited instances it still could possibly be a helpful strategy (if only to just start engaging the community at large and increasing brand awareness)
I think this post focuses a little too much on the SEO aspect of this blog commenting strategy. While it is a good strategy for SEO, and it does work, I think the real benefit comes from becoming part of the community that is focused on whatever your startup is involved in. That exposure helps create customers/evangelists that will then help promote your product/service to others within their sphere of influence. The SEO is just an added benefit.
If SEO and link building/link earning was this easy, then everyone would be doing it and there would be no need for SEO firms. There would be no SEO industry. Companies wouldn't be hiring SEOs to do link earning for them.
Go ahead and try all of these methods described in that post and then see how well it works. Shortly thereafter you'll be contacting a good SEO firm to clean up the mess, remove bad links, and start creating content for you that earns you links.
Former SEO consultant here. This is a fine, low-effort low-reward way to build links. The reason it works is it is not actually that easy to write the kinds of comments that will make it on a worthwhile blog in the targeted industry. The person who does this is doing better than average unless the goal is a difficult one. The attention and traffic from comments actually part of conversations is real.
Even if the keywords targeted are very difficult, this is a fine activity for idle moments or for a marketing specialist/writer to do.
SEO is one of those types of skills you really don't want to be outsourcing to SEO firms. And why would they be the ones creating the link worthy content in the first place?
Well before I built my product for my current startup, I was an SEO consultant. And this is a very good, albeit simple, technique I've used. That's why I shared it.
Most people fail at SEO because they simply aren't persistent. This method breaks down the process to the point where it's the easiest it's going to get to stay consistent with your link building efforts.
Also, it's really easy to avoid bad links with this method: If a site doesn't look legit, just skip it.
Wow, it's pretty amazing, but you've described one of the use cases for my upcoming webapp: www.alertoid.com
Technically, Alertoid would be an RSS reader that goes beyond the Read/Unread tagging, with the Commented/Comment Approved stages you described. Furthermore, it can be used for inbound marketing: as you monitor the keywords that interest you, you see the blog posts that mention them and can use those as starting points or ideas for your own blog posts, because if bloggers love comments, they love answer posts or reposts even more, and it's another great way to start a conversation and get backlinks.
/shameless plug
Hope my pitch was clear enough, don't hesitate if you have any feedback. If you're interested by Alertoid, email's in my profile, would love to hear from you, even more if you're a marketing/PR professional.
Feedback on SERPIQ: I just signed up, on the confirmation page (http://serpiq.com/users/sign_up) I see "You have signed up successfully. However, your need to confirm your email address." but a signup form is still there, empty, as if nothing worked. That doesn't seem right!
oh man I've wanted to build such a webapp for so long. That's awesome, congrats!
I'd love to hear how you're tackling the problem of tracking the actual comments that were left without resorting to a browser plugin in order to pull the details from the actual form on submit. Or maybe I said too much :)
Luckily I have a very simple answer for you: I have never seen that app before. It looks very sexy though and I will be giving it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation!
Firstly I think I should point out that, I have previously used manual blog commenting to rank for highly competitive keywords.
The strategy was extremely effective however, it isn’t any more and doing SEO this way isn’t a strategy your startup should adopt.
Google Penguin and to some extent Panda, were brought in to stop this kind of SEO and some of the changes they made have been very effective in stopping the effectiveness of this type of Grey-Hat SEO.
Similarly, your startup is probably on a new domain & with the changes to Google Penguin/Panda to ensure you aren’t sandboxed the first 500-1000 links you acquire are extremely important. By doing Grey Hat SEO – blog commenting, directories, article sites you are putting yourself at risk of getting your site placed in the sandbox.
After that you’re probably going to get a manual review and that is something you don’t want & if you don’t think Google Penguin is effective, then don’t but Google are going to keep making Penguin smarter & more aggressive about punishing sites that have built non-authentically earned links.
Additionally if you’re an E-Commerce startup a completely different SEO approach is needed & blog commenting is definitely not the way to do it (as is the case for any startup).
I think that's quite the slippery slope you just played out there. Per the logic you presented, all blog commenters who put in a url in their comment are Grey Hat SEOs? Come on now, that's a massive stretch.
Penguin and Panda were introduced to combat blatant spamming practices, both with link building and content based spamming. Manually commenting with thoughtful replies is just being a good community member, getting a link back to your root domain is a nice little token for your efforts, and I would love to see a single case study of someone employing the strategy outlined in my post (at the volume I suggest) getting slapped by Google.
As I said in my comment, I have previously used manual blog commenting techniques to rank for highly competitive terms. Regardless of it being manual or not, it is a Grey Hat SEO technique. The way the spammers do it via spinning comments & blasting them out is Black Hat SEO along with the likes of XSS injections, Xrumer etc.
My comment was mainly referring to the first 500-1000 links of a website & avoiding being sandboxed etc due to significant changes with Penguin & Panda.
If a startup wants to link back then they should only do it if they aren't putting the keyword they want to rank for as their "name" which receives the link. However, this is still a Grey Hat SEO technique & whilst the risk reduces after the first 500-1000 links, it is much greater in those first core set of links & can easily see a website sandboxed.
Well in my post, I never advocated using anything other than your actual name, site, etc. In the comments, I explicitly recommend creating real profiles and using your real name. So I agree with you there.
First, those numbers and guidelines are entirely anecdotal. Yes, there is a "honeymoon" phase with new domains, but that's entirely unpredictable and there's no hard limit of links before you're in the clear (or in the danger zone for that matter).
Second, if a comment is put into moderation, and then must be approved by the blog owner, how is that anything but authentically earned? The blogger can approve or disprove your comment at her discretion, you're not exploiting any systems or anything.
I simply can't ever agree with someone who says that leaving a blog comment with your url in the website field makes you a Gray Hat SEO. If that were the case, there would be tens of thousands of mommy bloggers yelling at Google for banning their sites.
It's natural engagement with the community, with backlinks as a nice little perk.
I didn't get that from Rand's blog although I have read it. I got my figures through testing with some junk domains (I experimented with around 25 domains - .net, .com and .infos) to see of they get sandboxed when pushing X amount of links to it or by doing certain things and those were the results which I found albeit it's a small sample size.
Regarding the second part, it's very easy to beat the approval system on many blogging softwares - Wordpress for instance is extremely easy to do.
And regardless if you agree with me or not, blog commenting is a Grey Hat SEO technique. I also said that the effects for doing a few links is minimal in terms of negatively affecting a sites SEO rankings which I agree with you on, I am just disagreeing with you over the fact that this should be a startup's SEO strategy
There's an even easier strategy and it can be very successful: use your company blog to write generic startup fluff for HN even if it's irrelevant to your company and users or customers, which it will be almost 100% of the time.
That would bring a lot of badly targeted traffic. Sure, maybe better targeted than from a general interest site, but if your startup is targeting a specific profession, HN traffic is a drive-by, not exposure. Targeting is as valuable as raw traffic numbers, hence why Google is rich beyond the dreams of mortal men.
I think that the author's blog is separate from his company blog. Looks like he writes not only about SEO (which is what his product is built around), but startups, code, and general business.
GitHub Wikis have tons of lists of 'Apps using this library'. That, right there, is lots of link juice and promotion if you use a lot of open source libraries.
Not an SEO expert in any way, but I read that Google discounts links after the first n on the page. The n threshold varies with whom you listen to. Those pages look too much like link farms, so it's understandable why they would do that.
In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.
If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.