Blog Comment Service
Blog Comment Service:
How NOT to Overpay for It…
In general blog commenting is great for growing the number of incoming one way links for your site.
The only trouble is about certain number and strategies.
Because you are EITHER overpaying seriously for the service that doesn’t cost that much OR you do not get real SEO juice from the backlinks (because commenting services give you lesser quality to be able to give a cheaper price).
In this post I want to share my own experience about how to avoid the price “black holes” that suck in tons of $$$ when you buy blog comment packages for SEO. I also want to show the quality standards – what should be included into blog commenting package so that its backlinks give you real SEO juice and help you to increase ranks in search engines.
Price “Black hole” #1 – What are the Links in the Package – DoFollows or NoFollows?
When you see huge blog comment backlink packages like 100,000, 500,000, 1mln or even higher – this is almost a guarantee that these packages have lots of nofollow backlinks. And nofollows are official reported by Google to have no SEO value at all (if you don’t know what NoFollow is <= watch this video post).
And if you email the seller and ask – how many dofollow pages are in the blog comment list where they will blast your comments to – then you will notice that these packages usually shrink to much smaller numbers, like: 10k verified dofollows, 5k verified dofollows and smaller.
So, don’t build your price about the package looking at the big numbers of comments promised. Better ask how many dofollow comment pages will be in this list.
Price “Black hole” #2 – Blast and Forget
For blog comment providers the easiest way is to blast your comment with your backlink and then say “let’s wait how many of them will get approved…”
Don’t be surprised that if you ask in the email correspondence with comment provider about the usual comment approval level, then the numbers will range – but I personally met from ~70% approval level till as low as ~30%.
Even these ~30% aren’t bad. But isn’t it more convenient to know that in advance. So that from the package of the 10k dofollow backlinks you get only 3,000. 3,000 extra backlinks is cool, but you expected 10,000 – and just because of failing to ask – got into over-expectations.
So, make sure to ask how many VERIFIED backlinks you will get from the package. Backlinks that you can check in the report and see with your own eyes.
Price “Black hole” #3 – Pinging and Quickness of Results
One more thing that commenting services usually hate doing is pinging. The advantages of pinging for your comments is huge. Just imagine that after blog comment with your backlink appear on a blog post page, it may take days or weeks or even more for search engines to get back to this page and re-index it – with your backlink on it.
This process can be pushed up by manual pining of all pages with your blog comment. This ensures that each and every backlink that was built on comments is indexed faster.
Published – pinged – indexed!
But, pinging “eats” lots of technical resources. It is quite expensive.
That is why often you can see that blog commenting services simply blast the comments and don’t ping the pages afterward. If you see a cheap price for the blog commenting package – then it’s 99.999% that the package goes without pining. And it seriously stretches the time line for getting results from your comment backlinks.
Whenever possible – ask to ping your comments (comments with your backlinks inside) to speed up the indexing process.
Price vs Quality:
Possible to Pay Cheap and
Get Real Results?
It is important to understand that all these “tricks” of giving you less quality are done by blog commenting services because they want to have cheaper price. Get yourself into the shoes of blog comment service owner – “I can put $20 on the 1,000 comment package (without pinging, without reports, with tons of nofollows in that 1,000 list, with only a small portion of backlinks that will get published) or I should put $$70-$80 on the same package (with all 100% verified, all dofollows, pinged, reported, etc.) – what should I choose?”
Most of the comment services will choose the cheaper/SEO “weaker” package, because YOU, my dear blog readers, love cheap SEO prices.
You’d better buy a cheaper package, instead of paying real money for the real job.
And the owners of comment services “follow the trend” and give you dirt-cheap packages. But, of course, they will not pay from their own pocket for such vital SEO things as pinging, they will not be investing $300-$500 into buying lists of dofollow blog comment pages. They will not mess up with showing you reports where you can track your backlinks.
My own verdict is that every time you buy cheap comment package, you steal your own time and money, because comment backlinks of high quality standard require serious investments into technological procedures (like pinging via proxies on dedicated servers, proxy lists, job with reporting, etc.)
And if you see cheap price (let’s say $10 – $30 for 1,000 comment backlinks), then be prepared to surprises like:
- lots of nofollows in the list;
- even if there are dofollows, the approval rate is small;
- no pinging after comment is published;
- no reports.
All these elements are vital for the success of blog comment backlinks. Without them you get only a tiny portion of what you should expect to get.
Before you buy blog comment package – ask if all these elements are available in the package.
With this knowledge, even if you choose cheap package without all these elements – then at least you will know what you are doing.
Strider Balance Bike Fan said on December 16th, 2010 12:24 pm
Cheers so much for that post, lots of GR8 info and I’m sure that it’s going to help a lot of us who regularly look for comment services.
I remember buying a package for $9 which promised so much and delivered absolutely rubbish
MY NEXT QUESTION – “when are you guy’s going to offer such a service?”
Affiliate Wordpress Theme said on December 16th, 2010 12:36 pm
Nice info FTS team – also I have to add that when ever I have asked for comments package it has only ever been from a outsourcer(Over paying no-doubt). My biggest gripe is that I need real comments not the stuff that I am forever deleting on my own blogs ! I am sure you know exactly what I mean…
Comments like “nice post” STINKS read the info and add something relevant is all that is needed for someone to actually follow the link too! I now it’s all about backlinks but real person following a comment link is just as valuable don’t you think?
pete said on December 16th, 2010 1:01 pm
Thats a great article, The biggest reservation I have about any commneting services is that it is basically spam as you are not sincere and therefore not contributing to the articles.
To be honest given the point above and the fact that wordpress blogs are built by default with the No Follow attribute, I think time would better spent putting 10 propoer comments on High PR/.edu/.blogs – after all the link juice (if they are do follow) you will get from those should be close to spamming 1000s of blogs (which most will be of low PR/Quality) if they are not monitoring this type of activity without spending too much time or wasting too much money.
Thats only my opinion.
Regards
Pete
Sparkliecandy said on December 16th, 2010 1:39 pm
What a coincidence as I am thinking about the same thing as well. This gave me a quick over view of what do employers expect from blog comment packages. Personally, I have not outsource this type of job yet as I dont entirely engage with it yet but I believe that I have not pinged links I have built my links on before.
Second hand cars said on December 16th, 2010 1:41 pm
Excellent blog, it puts to rest many doubts I had about certain backlink providers.
It can also be hard to find backlinks for certain niche websites that are legitimate dofollow links.
Once again, great post!
Thanks!
Holiday home web design said on December 16th, 2010 2:24 pm
Hi,
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I was considering a package similar to the one you described because I got fed up with finding quality blogs and not getting comments approved and seeming to get absolutely no link juice from them at all.
Perhaps I should forget quality blogs and start commenting on any blog.
I am really only a beginner at this and would like to know how you can tell if a link in a comment is dofollow or nofollow. Is there a quick and easy way to find out?
Thanks
Andy
Blogumetary said on December 16th, 2010 3:16 pm
Blog commenting may be a good way for SEO but just like everything else people misuse it. I think one very vital point to take into consideration in order to get the comment approved is to contribute to the subject of the post. Not things like “great post” or something like that.
I have seen people posting comments on acne related post and link to unrelated page or they just ramble about what has nothing to do with the content. I just delete these kind of comments.
Tony Clingan said on December 16th, 2010 9:28 pm
I think we all know the true value of these low cost backlinking services from the spam comments that appear on all of our blogs
Cut aside the out and out adverts posted as comments and you are left with the generic comments that clearly are not based on what you have been posting about
It certainly doesn’t help our credibility if our blogs are full of these posts
Far better to have a selected group commenting on a reciprocating basis, nobody of authority wants to comment on an empty blog
Thanks for sharing Tony
Learn How To Play The Violin Online said on December 16th, 2010 10:12 pm
All very good points. Cheap is not always best for your business. Also one thing not mentioned is what is the quality of the the blog comment itself? Does it provide any real value. I have started doing some of my own blog comments, trying to add some value to the conversation. Can’t document it, but it seems like I’m getting lots more approvals than paying for a cheap service.
Wynne said on December 17th, 2010 1:07 am
I disagreed with quite a bit of what you said:
1. Nofollow links do have value. You’ve made the mistake of buying into Matt Cutts bullshit spin doctoring concerning nofollow links. I think the only value of nofollow is to restrict the flow of Trust Rank. Page Rank is nowhere near as important as it once was. However, there are other factors like link velocity, and link diversity that google does take account of, and there nofollow is just completely understood. Can’t you see how this plays right into google’s hands? i.e. they are trying to stop link spammers AKA seo experts.
2. Pinging – I don’t recommend pinging. So what if the link takes 8 weeks to find. Or 5 months. That’s fine by me. It means that I have a constant flow of links being discovered. That in my opinion is far less suspicious than pinging and then having 2000 links show up in google the next day. I think the google bot is clever enough to figure that someone has just blasted several thousand links in one hit. Which is why if I ping, then I only do it when I am trying to re-cache specific pages on my money sites.
3. In terms of quality vs quantity, I’ll normally opt for quantity – but hey, that’s just my experience.
Wynne said on December 17th, 2010 1:10 am
However, what I will add that I agree with what you’ve said about having a report and verifiable links being extremely important. It’s the only way to determine if a link was actually dropped for you.
Joanne said on December 17th, 2010 3:17 am
Shouldn’t the page rank of the sites you are commenting on be considered as well? I thought that links from PR0 sites can hurt you rather than help you. What is your experience with this?
Geoff Jackson said on December 21st, 2010 4:12 pm
I wouldn’t advise link seekers to only go after ‘dofollow’ links at all, your advice is poor, seriously poor.
And in response to Joanne above me, don’t pay any attention to PageRank, it’s only an extremely approximate estimation of page authority – definately don’t build this factor into any link building – Google haven’t even updated the green toolbar PR for over 8 months now so it’s highly inaccurate.
PR always exists but it’s really on a measure of 0 – 1 and is constantly changing – the green TBPR is worthless.
Tom said on December 23rd, 2010 3:57 pm
I’ve tried lots of blog commenting services. Links end up in all kinds of strange places. Its like they had an army of spammers from third world countries hammering out repetitive comments on every imaginable PR1-5 blogsites, forums and directories. Would love to get my hands on a service which gives me laser guided precision!
Blog Info,Teknologi Dan Tips Komputer said on December 27th, 2010 11:56 am
Excellent blog, it puts to rest many doubts I had about certain backlink providers.
It can also be hard to find backlinks for certain niche websites that are legitimate dofollow links.
Matt Lambert said on December 27th, 2010 5:57 pm
With relevancy being such a factor, the blogs should be separated into broadly similar themes to be most effective..Stands to reason that services like these should be done in ‘vertical markets’ -
Ruthless Backlinks said on January 1st, 2011 5:06 pm
I have used blog commenting service, and IMO they rarely stick. I prefer profile links with anchor text but they take so much longer than blog links to get indexed. Would you care answering because I want to know what works better for you in terms of link juice? Blog comments or forum profile links?
Andrew said on January 4th, 2011 2:36 am
Right now I’m so inundated with seo work that I have been looking to outsource a lot of it and so far, what I’m reading on your blog here, makes the most sense. I have always thought you only get what you pay for and cheap isn’t always the most economical way to get results.
GMBand said on January 6th, 2011 4:48 pm
I think it’s good to have a mix of follow and no-follow links to your site. It looks pretty strange of all links are follow links, and I am sure that Google would suspect something.