From the very beginning of blogging, this has been one of the most popular methods of promoting your own blog. Leaving comments on popular blogs can easily bring a lot of visitors to your blog. Although some things changed during the last few years, and almost all comments are now using ‘nofollow’ and ‘nofollow external’ tags, in my opinion this is still one of the most useful free ways to drive traffic to your site or blog. The above remark about nofollow tags is related to SEO part of the process, since this technique will no longer bring inbound links to your blog, like it did before. I am of course referring to majority of popular blogs which use nofollow tags, and wordpress users, since wordpress now has this feature built in it.

Well although it was easy and free technique to gain some authority pagerank from popular blogs, it was massively exploited. People used to leave comments (and still they do), like “Well written!” or “Way to go” or “I agree” and simply add their site links with the post. That don’t make much sense at all. Some more advanced users even quoted random sentences from the post and then added their own. That often ended up in having uber-stupid comments and had to be dealt with. Well the publishers mostly went to the source of comment spam and the nofollow tag was born. You can learn more about nofollow tag here. So if we are not gaining any inbound links with our comments, what’s left? Why waste time and comment while I can do link exchanges you may ask?

Well you certainly shouldn’t bother leaving irrelevant comments just to gain exposure. But if you really feel like you have something to say, well that is something that you can greatly benefit from. There are many case studies on the net about this topic and I spent few days reading and learning about it. The key is that you need to build your online profile and reputation with care. Whatever you do, you need to know that someone will be watching you and your posts and that will very much reflect your site rankings. I believe that this is the trend that will only increase in the future. By adding quality and relevant comments on other people’s blogs you will only gain more and more readers to your own blog. By adding value to other people’s posts you will significantly increase your own site value. And that is the key here. That is exactly what Internet will become. That is why everyone has been talking about authority sites recently. Think like this. There were a lot of folks that made quick buck and dissapear off the face of the earth in the last hundred years, however only those that were the authority in their business are still standing. Ask Warren Buffet.

Here is a nice video about this topic that I had to share with you. It was published few days ago by Darren Rowse, aka Problogger. You all heard about Darren, and you can check his site here.

This video is great and is explaining and analyzing this topic very good. Darren used CrazyEgg to check some comments heat maps and the results were very interesting. This video is a proof on how important is to add value in your comments. Don’t waste time on junk posts, people. Add value and it will directly reflect to your site popularity.

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