Anybody who has managed a website or blog knows that the perpetual stream of comments that flow in are often nuisances. Given the sheer number of bots and other malicious actors, many people choose to turn comments off altogether on non-essential posts and pages.

Yet blog comments remain an important element for many bloggers who want to encourage engagement and interaction with their content. For you specifically, there can be a variety of benefits to either allowing others to build links or building them yourself on other blogs.

Whether you’re posting links in comments on other blog sites or wondering how to handle those who do so on yours, continue reading to figure out how to handle this dynamic effectively.

Do Blog Comments Create Link Juice?

Many years ago, commenting on blog posts was a common method for people to build links for their websites and potentially drive traffic to them from the comments themselves. As time passed, this practice became incredibly spammy – to the point that entire plug-ins and add-ons for bloggers now exist that filter out most comments due to their spam-like nature.

However, it has been widely established that pinging URLs in blog comments does not have any beneficial SEO potential. Most blog comment sections are now optimized with nofollow tags, meaning that search engines don’t even assess the quality or content of blog comments. Because of this, there’s only one potential set of benefits in blog comment links: the traffic they may otherwise generate.

Blog Comments as a Commenter

With the inherent SEO value of link building being completely negated in blog comments, you might be wondering whether or not there’s reason to link to your own site in blog comments. The answer is somewhat complex, but there does remain value in doing so in other ways.

Those who provide thoughtful commentary and relevant information who include a supplemental link to their website can benefit from additional traffic. While any one link isn’t likely to generate a tsunami of visitors, finding ways to genuinely incorporate one of your page’s links into replies on enough blogs can create a meaningful and steady amount of traffic that otherwise wouldn’t find you.

Blog Comments as a Blogger

Inherently, your default opinion on enabling or allowing comments on your own blog may be a bit different. After all, it can get frustrating to filter through all of those spammy comments where people (or more often, bots) are pinging URLs stuffed in between lines of gibberish.

However, embracing the notion of blog comments does provide an outlet for interaction and a sense of community. You may encourage conversations that would otherwise never happen, which gives those who have posted and replied a reason to return once more. Additionally, it can provide opportunities under the right circumstances for you to discover other blogs that are aligned with your own interests: this may present opportunities for everything from sharing content to guest posting.

There’s much to consider when deciding whether to engage in or allow blog comments, depending on whether you’re making them or accommodating them on your own website. However, there is inherent value in both side of the blog comment coin, depending on your priorities and willingness to engage. Ultimately, you’ll have to make a decision that best fits your brand’s specific needs.