I see this question come up quite a bit, and it’s usually asked by new website owners or companies that have recently started thinking about SEO and improving their website’s rankings. For some reason, perhaps because it’s easiest to understand and used frequently in SEO learning materials, webmasters often look towards blog commenting as their primary link building tactic.

So, does blog commenting increase your website’s rankings?

The answer is definitely yes, but only when used in conjunction with other link building tactics at the same time. The truth is, simply focusing all of your  link building efforts on blog commenting exclusively will not result in high rankings for even moderately competitive keywords.

Here’s why:

It’s tempting, especially when beginning marketing efforts for a new website, to focus on a single promotional method as a way to generate inbound links. But the problem with focusing exclusively on blog commenting stems directly from Google’s algorithm, which heavily favors websites that have links coming from many different sources.

Google ranks websites that have what Internet marketers refer to as a “natural” backlink profile. In other words, Google wants to rank websites that earn links because of their great usefulness, not websites that are best at pasting links across the web. In reality, a website that people really find useful will have links coming from all sorts of places including social media, forums, blog posts, other websites and more. This means that if you want Google to award your site with high rankings, your site’s backlink profile must look natural by having links pointing to it from a variety of sources. If your site only has blog comment links, Google will never be sure that it’s actually useful since any webmaster can comment on other blogs with ease.

Moreover, Google regularly adjusts their algorithm! What happens if there’s an update tomorrow that devalues blog commenting links? If you have a diverse backlink profile, you won’t have to worry so much about these algorithm updates negatively impacting your website.

Concretely, this means that yes, you should utilize blog commenting to build links, but you also need to utilize other strategies as well if you want your site to earn top spots in the search engines and stay there.