Many webmasters and website owners today have changed their focus from reciprocal links to non-reciprocal / one-way links due to the importance Search Engines give to one-way non-reciprocal links. There are a number of strategies that can be adopted to increase the number of one way, incoming links to a website. One of these, which you’ll come across, while reading many link building and development guides, is Blog Comments.

Leaving Useful Comments on blogs related to your niche is no doubt a very good idea to get links and users to your website. It is the easiest and most targeted method through which people will find you and will link to you if you provide useful comments and are a regular visitor to those blogs.

However, there is a very fine line in using Blog Commenting the ‘Ethical Way‘ and the ‘Unethical Way‘. If most of the incoming links to a website are from Blogs, and specifically from Blog Comments, Search Engines might end up penalizing your website.

Search Engines now consider websites that have a high percentage of links from Blogs as ‘Bad Neighborhood‘ sites. Domains that have a high occurrence of links that appear to be from blogs may be penalized by Search Engines. It may be normal for blogs and forums to have lots of incoming links from blogs, but for many commercial websites, a large percentage of links from blogs could indicate an attempt to increase search engine rankings through blog comment spamming.

So if you have a new website, and you plan to promote it and bring traffic and users to it through blog comments, make sure you have some other methods of attracting links to your website also, to even it all out. Incoming links from Blogs only can be harmful for your website.

One of the blogs I manage had started getting lots and lots of Comment Spam. I tried a number of spam protection techniques, including Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin, but it didnt work out. Even disabling ‘Add Comment’ and making it available to only registered users didn’t work out. The number of Comment spams to the blog increased to 5 comment spams every 5 minutes, which was really annoying.

I finally found the solution to all this when I came to know that most of these Blog Comment Spams are generated by Trackbacks and Pingbacks.

You can use the Simple Trackback Validation Plugin to get rid of Comment Span, or simply un-check the check box for Trackback notifications from your WordPress Admin panel under the ‘Options >> Discussions‘ tab. This will disable pingbacks and trackbacks on any new posts that you add to your blog.

Once you’ve updated the options, you’ll need to modify the pingback status for your old posts by running a simple SQL query in the SQL Tab of phpMyAdmin after selecting your Blog Database:

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE ping_status=’open’

Alternately, you can run the simpler version of this SQL query

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’

This will set the ping status for all your previous posts to 0 and will help you get rid of thousands of unwanted spammy Blog Comments.

Have you recently launched a weblog and are looking for ways to promote your blog?

Listed below are links to blog link directories, and blog feed submission sites. Links to other useful blog promotion articles are also given.

• List of Blog Submission Directories
• Submit your site to Blog Top Sites
• Submit and promote your blog in these Social Bookmarking sites
• Promote your Blog by submitting its RSS Feeds to these Blog Promotion Sites
• Submit Blog and Blog RSS Feeds

Also, these articles and links for Blog promotion will be helpful:

• How to Boost Your Blog Traffic
• Promote Your Blog
• About.com has some great tips on promoting weblogs

If you have any more links, please do share with our readers.