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Comment by InfinityX0 | Hacker News Reader

This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ which comes from one of the top agencies in the field.

In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.

If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.

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I've ranked quite a few sites with variations of this exact technique, so I'm not quite sure where the idea that these links won't benefit you is coming from. I absolutely respect your opinion though and do agree that reaching out to influencers and engaging them is a big big deal.

This strategy is simply a component of an overall outreach and SEO campaign for any product. It very much needs to be mixed in with a variety of other techniques for full success.

The reason I shared it was because once you spend the hour or so to set everything up, you can sit down each day with your cup of coffee and spend 15 minutes building some links while interacting with the community in a very easy way. Mix that in with more specific outreach and you have a good strategy for growing exposure to your product.

It's very likely what you did made ranking a correlative rather than causative effect. Most of these comments were probably no-follow, and even if not, devalued b/c below the fold - reasoning: the Reasonable Surfer patent -http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer...

I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.

That link you posted seems to be 404'ing

While I don't condone the methods posted in this case study, I think that it goes to show that no-follow links do have value, that your on-page doesn't have to be perfect, and that the types of links that you claim don't work actually do.

http://serpfu.com/case-study-insurance/

Once again, let me clarify that I don't condone the type of link building here, but I don't think that you can argue that it doesn't work.

Their "Backlink Bomb" provides "50,000+ backlinks from 10,000+ websites powered by 120+ content management systems and not a SINGLE blog comment."

Sounds like blog comments aren't the way to go.

They also advertise this service as "Penguin safe." Maybe if you launch your site between algorithm updates. You can definitely rank with these kind of links, but you will get torched eventually. This is not a long or even medium term strategy for what most of consider a startup.

Great advice. The days of quick spammy links are way over. Now posting a link on someone's blog for obvious SEO benefits is just tacky, and will get LESS people to link to you.

Organic is the key word here. Make links with people not websites.

There's nothing spammy about leaving a genuine comment on a real blog. This method simply automates the collection of possible blog posts to post on, there's nothing spammy about it at all.

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