Some questions are too popular to ignore, such as “How do I find blogs to comment on?” It seems like a no-brainer, you just type in your keywords and you have your results, right?

Um…No, that won’t work: you’ll find Amazon, YouTube (which by the way you can get backlinks from by commenting at…), a dozen EMD shopping portals and micro niche sites…

See the problem?

And then, most tutorials will tell you to use a search operator that’s about as long as the Mississippi during a deluge. Half the time these things work, other times you still need to dig, so what’s the point?

One of the easiest solutions is to use CommentHut or other software. CommentHut works like a champ, and there is a free version with reduced results, and what I like about it is that unlike other software, it doesn’t spam.

But in case you didn’t want to spend money, you can keep reading.

There are two key benefits to blog commenting – SEO/backlinks, and traffic. Of course, if you’re single, you might be commenting on your future love interest’s blog, who knows?

There are so many search operators floating around that, when you actually begin to use them, you find a mixed bag of irrelevant or sometimes dead blogs – and do you really want to be next to the Viagra or Porn commenters?

And really quickly – there is some speculation that the nofollow tag is irrelevant – some search engines ignore it, anyway. Google reportedly doesn’t count nofollow links – but that is up for debate. What is true, though – you need both nofollow and dofollow for a natural linking profile.

Of course you can always use Best-Reviewer, from the creator of SheToldMe, and get up to 20 backlinks (and 100% AdSense revenue for a limited time). Both of those are more social sites – but keep them in mind.

Here are just a handful of ways that nobody else seems to talk about much.

10 Ways To Find Blogs To Comment On

1. Go to the directories

Try DMOZ and the Yahoo! directory, Best of the Web – and popular blogs such as BlogEngage or TechnShare, SERPd and the like.

The directories are still a good way to find blogs that are industry-specific. The other sites (like SERPd) are top places bloggers of all sorts comment on industry stories. You can either leave comments of your own or just follow the comments to the respective blogger’s blog.

Usually you find people who are more than happy to get a few extra comments – that’s what they’re doing in the first place!

When you find a blog to comment on it’s like finding the motherlode – chase down all the other commentators to their blogs and comment on them, too. Happens here all the time.

2. Look for footprints

This is something I learned from being a happy Magic Submitter customer, Alexander Krulik’s training modules showed me a thing or two I didn’t realize. One of which is looking for footprints.

Such as:

“Powered By WordPress”

“Powered By Blogengine.net” (Supposedly Blogengine blogs are dofollow – unlike WordPress which are nofollow by default.)

Here’s a thought – next time you happen across a blog you’re commenting on, look for the footprint – it’s usually in the footer (“Powered by” is pretty popular followed by…whatever the footprint is. It works for finding forums, too – Powered by SMF which is Simple Machines Forums, or phpBB, etc.)

3. Two particular plugin footprints

The two that seem to turn up tons of blogs are:

“YourName@YourKeywords” = KeywordLuv enabled blog
“CommentLUV Enabled” = CommentLUV enabled blog

Add those to your search in Google – and a “+” followed by your keywords. These two WordPress plugins usually indicate a dofollow blog, although not 100% of the time they are great for SEO purposes. In Google, your search would be:

“YourName@YourKeywords”+”CommentLUV Enabled”+[Your Keywords]

Or…you can just type in:

“This site uses CommentLUV and KeywordLUV” + [Yo' Stuff You Be Lookin' Fo']

Sometimes you won’t strike “gold” and find both CommentLUV and KeywordLUV at the same time – then just use the one or the other.

Benefits of CommentLUV or KeywordLUV – Why look for these feetprints (whatever!)?

CommentLUV is an awesome way to get real traffic and deeplinks at the same time (deeplinks = links to an inner page versus homepage). Humans, you know – people that buy your stuff? – read a catchy title and follow it from wherever you left the comment. I do it all the time – both to promote my posts and money pages and also to get real traffic.

The benefit of KeywordLUV is twofold – supposedly the plugin makes your blog “DoFollow” – the links pass authority or PageRank from the blog commented on to your blog (in the rare case you can find higher PR blogs). The other benefit is that you get to generate a link using your keywords versus a title, or “JamestheJust @ The Average Genius” etc.

The third benefit to both of these plugins that they obviously appear on blogs…not a shopping portal, or some other place of the sort.

4. Go directly to CommentLUV the website

The reason being that there is a big, fat block of other users in the sidebar — um, they’re using CommentLUV on their blogs…pretty easy. Check out Comluv.

5. Go to Feedjit

Feedjit at http://feedjit.com/pro/findSites/0/ has a blog finding feature, of others using Feedjit, a.k.a. other blogs.

The blurry picture tells it all:

Feedjit Blog Search

Find Blogs to Comment on With Feedjit

This is a great plugin first off to get free backlinks (learned that from Sara) – I have over 150 or so just from installing it, people have found my blog that way – but as you can see from the picture above, you can find other blogs that are on-topic.

6. Use content syndication networks

Sign up for free backlinks/content from Unique Article Wizard, ArticleRanks, Free Traffic System, etc.

Have them sent to a dummy email that you don’t use otherwise. Why? Because you’re collecting a bunch of articles with backlinks going to blogs (usually). These aren’t all autoblogs, by the way – some are websites without a comment section, others are viable blogs that have been monetized.

So my thinking is: if someone wants to rank their blog, doesn’t it stand to reason many of them would invite comments as well? Not only that – but they’re potential places for future guest posts. Just collect the articles for a while, use them if you want to on your blogs – but go through the stack once a week and see what you find.

This also works with Google and Yahoo! Alerts – same principle.

7. Use Google’s Advanced search

It’s right next to the search box. It says, you might have guessed, “Advanced Search” and opens up a fairly straightforward form. This is great if you don’t know the uber-advanced search operators that Geeks think in.

Find Blogs Google Advanced

Google Advanced Finds Blogs For Comments

In the final field you can add “.edu” or “.gov” – sometimes you get good results and other times you just filled out a form to while the time. I usually just use the following tip, but wanted to share this one with you (trying to get to 10 tips…)

8. Google Blog Search

This is where I think I’m stating the obvious but whatev’ – I personally just found this a few months ago and didn’t mention it because I think I’m the only guy on the planet who missed it.

In Google’s sidebar, when you input a search, look at the left side AND at the top in the “More” section:

Find Blogs Google Blog Search

Google Blog Search Finds Blogs

See the “More”? In the sidebar, you have to hit the “More” and the option to find blogs will show up, along with other options (“Discussions” will turn up Yahoo! Answers types of results, along with forums and other places where you can normally discuss the topic – but they’re not usually blogs).

9. Use SEO Spyglass or SEO Quake

If you haven’t downloaded SEO PowerSuite yet, just wondering if you want a written invitation or if you hate your life?

Alright, that may be putting things a little strong. Let me back up and say that of all the tools I have, SEO PowerSuite (which includes SEO Spyglass and three other tools) and SEO Quake are my two favorites…or five favorites…whatev’.

Either SEO Spyglass or SEO Quake, or Yahoo! Site Explorer (I’m sure other tools like Market Samurai and Traffic Travis, etc. do this) let you analyze your competition’s backlinks – guess what? You now have a list of places to get backlinks from. Yes, including blogs.

10. HubPages, other Web 2.0 sites

Use your own blogs (if they’re Web 2.0′s or different C-Class IPs – don’t bother commenting on your self-hosted sites if they’re on the same C-Class IP or a sub-domain, there is little SEO benefit to that).

HubPages is great for a ton of reasons – they rank well and they offer money-making opportunities (if you use them right, don’t expect to make tons with their revenue sharing…too much work that way): you need to get your Hubber score over 75, and do that by commenting in forums at HP, on other hubs, building more hubs…

If you get your score over 75, your links are then “dofollow” versus “nofollow.” Do that, and then comment on your own hubs linking to other websites you own than what you are linking to in the Hub itself. The benefit is that you can use your keywords as your name – but if you try that with other Hubbers, you may not get through – but hey! That’s worth a shot, too.

Just be sure you’re commenting on Hubs where the hubscore is over 75 – or at least where the Hubber’s score is over 75 (go to their profile to see their score).

IP Cloaking Tip

Just in case you don’t want your IP address to show to a competitor, you can just use a proxy, like http://HideMyAss.com – and you can do that when you comment on blogs, too, if you don’t want to flag your competitors that you own X, Y and Z websites. Voila!

Who dat?

I dunno. They masked their IP.

Well – that’s all I’ve got (lying of course, but I have to stop writing at some point, I’ve clients to attend to). If you want one more place to look…OK, fine. A “Bonus” if you will:

Bonus place to find blogs to comment on.

Behind the couch. I find all KINDS of stuff there, or have you tried in between the cushions? OR: The lint trap – and no, I don’t mean your belly button, I mean the lint trap in the clothes dryer – which you should be cleaning out every Haley’s Comet orbit at least, to avoid a house fire.

Seriously, there are plenty of tutorials on this, such as Alex from Australia talking about NoFollow vs. Dofollow and finding blogs to comment on – much more succinct than my treatment here – and tools such as the DoFollow Diver at InLineSEO (Lisa Parmley – oh, she knows her stuff, and thanks to Sara for mentioning this at her blog NoteworthyTips.com).

If you commit to 5 blogs a week to comment on, even if only 5 days a week, that’s 25 links a week, or double it for 50. OR if you were on tons of Mountain Dew with espresso chasers, you could comment all day long until your fingertips were missing – then you could easily comment on 3,000 blogs a day.

Boo ya. Who needs fingertips? Unless you’re a bowler.

Commenting takes a few minutes – just make sure you leave a comment that contributes, and don’t even bother with “Nice post” or some $%#! like that…

And in case you missed it – I said Best-Reviewer and SheToldMe will give you 100% of your AdSense revenue AND backlinks (I think the offer on Best-Reviewer is an introductory deal, I just joined – free – a few days ago).

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