Blog commenting has taken bad hit recently. It has been so easy to create fly-by-night blogs and to comment spam other blogs that there is just too much junk being created all around the blogosphere.

If, like my web design company,  you have experienced using WordPress, you know what I’m talking about. You would tend to receive a lot of junk comments if you are in the more popular niches like make-money, health, or dating.

Nevertheless, blog commenting still holds a lot of potential if you do it right. Blogs tend to have a life of their own since the owner is does their own promotion for their site. That means if you participate in a popular blog, your backlinks tend to get exposed to increasing traffic in the long run as well as get more link juice.

In the spirit of Evergreen SEO, remember that if we create spam we get junk in return. On the other hand, if we participate nicely, we’ll get gold that lasts forever.

Basic Evergreen SEO Principles for Blog Participation

1. Multiple comments each. Traditional blog comment SEO usually teaches you to find a blog, post a nice comment, find another blog, post a nice comment, rinse and repeat as fast as you can to get as many backlinks as you can. It’s a little conspicuous if you ask me that your website has exactly one inbound link each coming from a lot of different sites and I believe Google is picking up on this. Participate by commenting on different posts on the blog, replying to other posts, and replying to replies on your posts.
2. Build a relationship with the owner. Think of blog participation as building a relationship with the owner. If you keep on commenting on the same blog, the owner of the website would tend to get familiar with you. This then could lead to a potentially fruitful relationship in the future (JV, guest posting, business partnerships).
3. An interaction between people. Blogs, unlike traditional websites, were designed primarily for individuals and not companies (except for news blogs). It functions like a personal online journal. Although corporations aren’t prevented from installing blogs, visitors respond more to personal blogs and subconsciously perceive corporate blogs as mere sales pitch channels. Blogs always have that personal appeal. Keep in mind that you are interacting with people when you participate in the blogosphere.

Evergreen SEO – Blog Participation Method

STEP 1: Find quality blogs to participate in.

What we need are high-traffic blogs which indicates the blog’s popularity. The usual indication of high-traffic blogs are the number of comments on the blog posts or, if available, the number of feed subscriptions. Be careful to scan the blog comments though to make sure that they are not just spam. A good 10-15 quality comments per blog post may indicate a very popular blog. Adjust accordingly depending on your niche.

Personally, I only participate on personal blogs and not company blogs. It’s my personal preference and my reasoning is that individuals who put up their own name out there have much more to lose if they don’t take care of their blog. These bloggers tend to put more effort keeping their blogs well-kept. This is just my preference though so feel free to participate on whichever blogs you are comfortable with.

I also don’t mind blogs that require registration or moderated comments. This is a good indication of quality blogs. You get no spam on these blogs and there are few competitions from other SEO practitioners.

The blog, for SEO purposes, should allow you to post your website (your name in the comment becomes the link). If the owner is not strict with outbound links in the comment itself, then that’s better.

You can go about finding these blogs in many ways.

1. If you know the name of an expert in your niche, then simple do a search in Google with “their name” + blog as you search term.
2. Do a search in Google with “your keyword” + “10..50 comments” as your search term. This means you’ll find blogs with posts that have 10-50 comments on them. You can adjust the numbers to indicate your desired range.
3. Visit blog search engines like blogsearch.google.com or technorati.com and conduct your search there.

STEP 2: Post quality comments.

Register if required then make your comments. You can comment on several posts but don’t overdo it.

I suggest you join the blog’s RSS feed so that you can receive immediate updates on new posts. You can then go back and be the first to comment on them.

STEP 3: Expand to more blogs at a pace you are comfortable with.

Look for more blogs to post comments on. Blog commenting doesn’t require a lot of time to do so it’s quite reasonable to be able to keep track of many blogs at the same time.

Conclusion

As the core of Evergreen SEO, it’s all about honesty and hard work. Honesty and hard work to give quality content on the web is always rewarded with evergreen returns. Do good work and those in power who value goodness (i.e. Google’s policy after all is “Do No Evil”) would conspire to keep you on top.

When it comes to blog commenting, this aforementioned principle still holds. In the end, the only blogs that would remain standing are the quality ones. If you do blog commenting the Evergreen SEO way, you’ll be part of the success of those blogs in the end.