Blog commenting is very useful in brand building but one should focus on the topic while commenting. If you’re trying to create value and good discussion which could produce better results in the same topic, that’s worth. It will create trust and build your brand itself.

I really want to agree with you Nick. However, perhaps you should have added “…if done properly”. Trouble is, many responders are often spammers, sometimes with strange names such as, for example, “mortgage loans”, “credit cards” etc. You get the drift.

Yes, a lot of blogs do carefully check before approving comments. Many more don’t, unfortunately, which can lead some (many) into temptation, not to mention a Google penalty (penguin et al).

In a sense, deliberately pointing a link – any link – to your own website could be viewed as infringing Google’s TOS, don’t you think? Often it’s an attempt to manipulate the serps, nothing more. Yet you see it all the time, with highly optimized articles prime examples, often written by professional SEO companies. The articles/info may be interesting, but they’ve been written for only one purpose.

Now I am extremely wary of adding any link, unless the link text is purely my real name, nothing else.

Even then, it seems, there’s no guarantee some kind of penalty won’t result. Paranoid? Yes. Ridiculous? Yes.

Maybe the concept of links should be abandoned altogether? After all, it’s as easy to simply copy and paste a URL straight into the address bar of a browser and hit the ‘enter’ button, which I do often.

This is definitely bookmarked & will be shared with my followers!!!

I try to frequent my favourite blogs on a regular basis and get involved in ongoing discussions rather than leave just one quick comment on tons of blogs.

First, I do read a lot of blogs and try to leave a comment whenever appropriate. There are just so many benefits with it. First of all it’s becasue I want to show some appreciation to the blogger as writing is a lot of hard work and a comment is at least to some level a reward – you know that you engaged at least one person with your post. Of course, it’s good for me that I get a link as well and I try to reward my readers with links as well.

However, even though you cover it a bit with the length of the comment (bullet 2) and using the real name (bullet 3) I feel that I want to point out that bloggers want Real comments. I would feel very uncomfortable commenting in a blog I don’t read for this reason. I believe I do recognize a “link comment” when it shows up in my own blogs and that always gives me a bad feeling. Every comment makes me happy and all of a sudden it turns out to be just SEO.

To summarize: I love real comments and I’m prepared to share some of my link equity to those. Bullet 2 and 3 are extra important, real name and a proper comment makes the whole difference.