Do High PR Backlinks From Blog Comments Really Work?

A few years ago high PR backlinks from manual blog commenting exploded and became one of the most popular ways to build high PR links quickly and effectively.

Way back then they were very powerful especially if you leveraged the strength of high PR comment links.

It was incredibly easy to rank pages with nothing but blog comments but then tools like Scrapebox came along and ruined the party for everyone as every man and his dog was blasting hundreds of thousands of comments out per day and they become less effective.

UPDATE: You can get high PR backlinks from LinksThatRank or any one of these link building services.

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What Are High PR Backlinks?

High PR backlinks are when you get a link to your website from a website that has a high level of authority or page rank. They are considered to be the most powerful type of backlink you can get.

Are High PR Links From Comments Still Effective?

I use high PR links from manual blog commenting as part of my overall link building process but it is difficult to judge if it is still effective as it once was when you are building lots of different links over a number of months.

There is only one way to find out (you know where this is going right?) so I decided to setup my own test and share the results with you!

Can You Rank A Page With High PR Backlinks From Comments?

In this experiment I selected a keyword focused inner page of a website that is already ranking well in the SERPS for its main terms. The inner page I chose had no previous link building work done on it all and was perfect for the purposes of this experiment.

Keyword #1 Competition

High PR Blog Comments KW1 Competition

Keyword #2 Competition

High PR Links From Comments KW2 Competition

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Experiment Details

The page mentioned above was already optimised for the 2 keywords. Keyword 1 naturally ranked at position 62 and keyword 2 ranked at position 69 at the start of the experiment.

Every week for 4 weeks I built 100 new high PR backlinks with comments and ensured every target page had-

I did not spread out the link building each week and just built all 100 of them in one go every Tuesday morning.

Pretty simple stuff and a few years ago that would have been more than enough to rank for some pretty decent terms.

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21st Feb – Experiment Results So Far

I started building the links on the 7th Of February and so far 200 of the 400 planned links have been built.

21st Feb Keyword #1 Rankings (Started at #62)

21st Feb Keyword #1 Rankings

21st Feb Keyword #2 Rankings (Started at #69)

21st Feb Keyword #2 Rankings

So 200 links seems to have a positive uplift so far and I’m sure Google are still playing catch up with finding all the juicy new links. Both keywords have jumped up at least 10 positions or so.

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12th March – Ranking Update

Last week I built the final set of the links to the page which has now had at least 400 high PR backlinks from comments built to it over the past 4 weeks. Rankings below-

12th March Keyword #1 Rankings (Started at #62)

12th March Keyword #1 Rankings

12th March Keyword #2 Rankings (Started at #69)

12th March Keyword #2 Rankings

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Summary

Both keywords have shown fairly decent increases in rank across the past 4 weeks. Keyword #1 has jumped up 23 places so far and keyword #2 has jumped up 25 places although both seem to be jumping between the 40’s and 50’s at the moment.

Google will still be playing catch up with all of the links that have been built so I will update the page again in a couple of weeks with the results of that.

Clearly high PR blog comments do carry some weight and still provide traction with Google although I wouldn’t like to completely rely on them to get me to the number 1 position. You should definitely be using them to support and diversify your existing link building campaigns.

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What Are Your Thoughts?

2,164 Responses

  1. Still, high PR blogs are hard to penetrate, even from commenting a blog post.Since Penguin and Panda, it’s hard to do link building.But it’s really a nice post.Thanks Matt

  2. Great post. I was doing a search on whether or not blog commenting was still worth it to building traffic. Thus far, I’ve only put my homepage on blog comments, but now I am going to switch and put an internal page.

  3. Very informative experiment. So it means comment backlink is still alive. Thank you for the information.

  4. Hi Matthew,First of all thank you. I think your thoughts are right.High PR Backlinks From Blog Comments Really Work.Comment back link with other backlinks is a good way to rank a site.

  5. Good read as usual Mathew. Its nice to see that your tests are showing a positive result. I was almost expecting to see a negative result with that many comment backlinks. I was kind of thinking Google might categorize it as webspam

  6. I don’t know which keywords you’ve used for your experiment but I have seen some pages reaching the front page of Google just powered with comment backlinks. However, I must disclose the fact that those keywords were not very difficult to rank due to lack of competition.

  7. Yes commenting on blogs may bring some juice. However, I don’t think it has great impact on SERPs. It can help to boost some rankings and it could be helpful to newbies. Also, do not comment just for the sake of it. Add some value to the discussion.

  8. Great article mattew! blog comments are important , but i would rather create web 2.0 than spending a day commenting on blogs and forum.

  9. How to create comments with link? If I create comments with link then it is deleted by moderator.

  10. It used to work well back in the day. Does this method still work on 2017? Any negative effect on a site?

  11. Hey, Matthew. Very interesting experiment you did there. I can’t see the date on the original post, but i see that you’ve updated the post for March 2017 so im assuming that this still works. I think you just proved how much work linkbuilding is with just this one post ;D.My question for you is did you build all these out manually or did you use a tool to aid. Im sorry for asking if its was in the post though i did not see it. I saw you mention Scrapebox, is that what you used?Anyways, thanks for the post.Cheers,Krystal (Sky)

  12. Hi Matthew,My thought on blog commenting: If Google does not keep a good eye on backlinks, I would like to do the art of blog commenting on high PR sites related to my niche. At least My blog will get popular among readers. Like how we post for our loyal readers, we should treat commenting method as a way to reach the right audience.Thanks.

  13. Great blog! I was really not sure if blog commenting was still useful but after I read your article, it changed my mind, thank you!

  14. I saw too many articles on this topic, but this one is better and little different so big thanks for this article

  15. Great post Matthew. I was just strategizing on how to get some easy links going for a brand new site. Based on your results I think I will begin with a handful of blog comments here and there.

  16. I see you wrote this post a few months ago I am just wandering if blog commenting still works this days Matt.

  17. Your post is really great. I have a question. My blog is turkish, if I comment webpages non turkish, can it be positive for my blog?

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