Do Comment Links Do Anything for SEO?

Almost nothing, as links. Blog and forum comment links are nofollowed on virtually every platform, so they pass no ranking value, and bulk comment links are explicitly named in Google's link spam policies. A thoughtful comment can still earn referral traffic and a relationship that leads to a real link — but the link itself is not the point.

The `nofollow` attribute was invented for this exact problem

In January 2005, Google, Yahoo and MSN jointly introduced rel="nofollow", and the reason given at the time was comment spam. Automated tools were flooding blog comment forms with links, and the attribute existed to let publishers say "this link is here because a visitor put it here, not because we endorse it."

Twenty years later, that's still the default. WordPress — which runs a large share of the web's blogs — applies nofollow to comment author links out of the box, and in 2019 Google added rel="ugc" specifically for user-generated content, which is what modern comment systems tend to emit. Disqus, most forum software, and every large community platform do the same.

Since March 2020 Google treats these attributes as hints rather than absolute directives, meaning it may consider such a link for crawling, indexing or ranking. That's a genuine nuance, but it's a long way from "comment links work." The default remains: no value passed. Dofollow vs nofollow links covers what the distinction does and doesn't mean.

Bulk commenting is a named spam pattern

Google's link spam policy lists, among examples of unnatural links, comments with optimised anchor text and links, and Google publishes separate guidance for site owners on preventing comment spam. It is one of the oldest, best-understood manipulation patterns there is, and the detection is correspondingly mature.

So the risk profile is unattractive from both directions:

As the commenter, you're generating a pattern of low-quality, off-topic links with keyword anchors across unrelated sites. Even if each is nofollowed and inert, the profile is the shape systems look for.
As the site owner, an open comment section fills with spam that makes your own pages look worse, and Google's guidance is clear that you're responsible for what appears on your site.

The paid version of this is still sold — "500 dofollow blog comment backlinks" for a few dollars. Those listings are either nofollowed anyway, on sites that exist only to host comment spam, or on pages that will be deleted within weeks. It's the same economics as any other bulk-link product, covered in what to avoid when building backlinks and outdated backlink types.

What commenting is actually good for

Three things, none of them PageRank. Each requires the comment to be worth reading.

1. Referral traffic from a small, self-selected audience. People who read comments on an industry blog are unusually engaged. A comment that adds a real point — a counterexample, a number, a correction — gets clicked by a small number of people who are exactly the audience you want. Small numbers, high quality.

2. Being seen by the author. This is the mechanism that matters. Blog authors read their own comments. Turning up repeatedly with something substantive is a slow, low-friction way to become a name someone recognises — and the person who recognises you is the person who might link to you, quote you, or accept a guest post. That's the pipeline described in backlink outreach that gets replies.

3. Discovery, occasionally. Comment pages are crawlable, so a URL in one is a path a crawler can take. This barely matters given how easy indexing is by other means, and it's not a reason to comment.

Notice what all three have in common: the value comes from the comment being genuinely useful to the people reading it. There is no version where the link does the work.

How to tell the difference in one sentence

If you'd write the comment without the link field, it's worth writing. If the comment exists to hold the link, it's spam — and everyone reading it, including the moderator, can tell.

Practical rules if you're going to do it at all: comment on posts you've actually read, respond to the argument rather than the topic, use your real name, leave the website field as your homepage rather than a keyword-stuffed deep link, and never drop a link inside the comment body unless you're citing something directly relevant. Comment on ten blogs you genuinely follow, not a hundred you found in a scraped list.

What to do with the time instead

Commenting has a low ceiling by design. If you need followed, in-content links from relevant sites, the routes that work are earning them with something worth citing, pitching them through outreach, or trading them directly.

Backlinkster does the third. Site owners in related niches swap one-for-one in-content links — inside a real sentence on a real page, not in a comment field — and every placement is verified live by code, so nothing silently disappears. Five swaps a month on the free plan; see the plans.

Frequently asked questions

Do comment links do anything for SEO? Not as links. Comment links carry nofollow or ugc on virtually every platform, so they pass no ranking value, and bulk comment links are named in Google's link spam policies. A substantive comment can still generate referral traffic and a relationship with the author, which is where the real value is.

Are blog comment links nofollow? On almost every platform, yes. WordPress nofollows comment author links by default, Disqus and most forum software do the same, and rel="ugc" exists specifically for this type of link. The nofollow attribute itself was created in 2005 to solve comment spam.

Can comment links get my site penalised? Bulk, automated or keyword-stuffed commenting is exactly the pattern Google's link spam policy describes. Individual thoughtful comments are not a risk. A commenting campaign across unrelated sites is one, and it buys you nothing even when it goes unnoticed.

Are there still dofollow blog comments? A few sites don't apply the attribute, and services sell lists of them. Chasing those lists puts you on precisely the pages that attract every other link spammer, which is the least useful neighbourhood on the web. The absence of a nofollow attribute does not make a spam link valuable.

Should I buy blog comment backlinks? No. They're nofollowed, placed on sites that exist to host them, frequently deleted, and constitute a manufactured link pattern. Nothing about the package changes any of that.

Do forum comments and Reddit links count? Same attribute treatment — nofollowed or ugc, so no direct value. Reddit is a partial exception for a different reason: its threads are cited heavily by AI assistants and can send referral traffic for years. That's a presence argument, not a link argument.

Is it worth allowing comments on my own blog? Only if you'll moderate them. An unmoderated comment section fills with spam links that degrade your own pages, and Google's guidance puts responsibility for that on you. Moderation, or turn them off.

The bottom line

Comment links are a solved problem from Google's side — nofollowed by default since 2005, named in the spam policies, and detected reliably. Treat commenting as a relationship activity with a small traffic bonus, cap it at the handful of blogs you genuinely read, and get your actual links from earning, asking, or trading.