[WillyF]

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.

[dchuk]

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.

In regards to the nofollow topic, I left a comment on the post explaining my thoughts about that: http://www.layeredthoughts.com/seo-link-building/the-really-...

[WillyF]

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.

[dchuk]

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.

[WillyF]

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.