Wednesday 8 August 2007

BuyBlogComments.com review

BuyBlogComments.com is a service launched in July 2007 and run by Jon Waraas, where you can pay to have someone leave relevant blog comments on a bunch of blogs in your industry, with an anchor text and URL of your choosing. This gives a mild SEO benefit (despite most blog comments having rel=nofollow applied) and a bit of traffic toward your site. Many people hire freelancers from the likes of Rent-A-Coder or Get-A-Freelancer to do this kind of work; some call it black hat, though in my opinion, that's a little rude; black hat's often much cleverer.

I tried out this service, with the smallest package of 100 comments for $19.99.

When you apply, the post-purchase page says you'll be contacted within 12-24 hours. Now, I dived in there making a purchase shortly after the launch of the service; I'm not sure why, but it took about 4 days of hearing plain silence before I started being a little concerned, whereupon I emailed Jon, who reassured me that they hadn't forgotten my order, and was appropriately apologetic.

Lo and behold, a few more days later, a spreadsheet arrived with 100 URLs to blog comments. Fantastic, I thought; that was easy and quick!

So, I decided to review this list, to see how BuyBlogComments.com has done. I was a little disappointed by the details; a bit more attention to quality and thoroughness would've saved a few mistakes. I waited one week after receiving the URL list before checking it, to allow bloggers to approve comments.

One of the things that BuyBlogComments.com really pushed themselves on was the relevance of blog comments - "What BuyBlogComments.Com does is pay people to write quality blog comments on quality blogs" - though I found really generic comments, such as "dana: truly valuable post" (that's the entire comment! see mikes5starstore.typepad.com). The reporting was also really unclear in places; sometimes the links led to blank pages, or just the blog homepage - this is tough when there are a lot of posts. For example, I was given this link - see if you can guess which post the comment's on:

http://sheabutterblog.blogspot.com/ (shea butter)
The entire blog is about "shea butter", with hundreds of posts!
At other times, there would be a link to a blog that's utterly irrelevant. I tested the system out with a fashion/apparel themed site; I got left this comment. The topic's not relevant (mattresses are not fashionable, despite what your local bed retailer thinks!), the grammar's bad, the spelling's actually off - how people manage to misspell commercial copywriting these days is beyond me - and the comment itself has had no thought applied to it.

BuyBlogComments.com also suggests that "They are hand written by excellent english (sic) speaking people in America and Canada. We have a really great system here at Buy Blog Comments." That may be true; I don't see any claim to having native English speakers, which might explain the low rate. Of course that's not a problem until grammar and spelling mistakes appear, which they do. I'd much rather have a guarantee that comments will be syntactically correct than a guarantee of the location of the posters.

Another thing I noticed was that some comment URLs were actually duplicated within the list. That's right, I only received 97 unique URLs. I contacted Jon about this (as well as a few other mistakes) and he didn't provide any kind of answer or compensation.

Anyway, my biggest problem was that 33 of the 97 comments simply were not there. There's a bit on the legal part of the Buyblogcomments.com site, which Jon kindly referred me to, that says they only guarantee the posting of comments, and not their approval. Doesn't this sound like a loophole to allow them to just give you 100 blog post URLs sans comment and say "well, we submitted one!"? I'm quite stunned at the failure rate and how badly blogs were chosen; some were obviously dead/slow blogs that were pointless to comment. A paid service should, at the very least, review these factors before commenting, to ensure a successful comment approval:

  1. Comment should contribute to the post
  2. Post should have been made within the past week
  3. Other comments on other posts should have been approved recently
  4. Post shouldn't say "I am going on holiday for a while"
  5. Comment should be grammatically correct and well-spelled
  6. Post should already have some approved comments


There were definite cases where one or more of these suggestions had been completely ignored. I voiced my opinions to Jon, and after hearing nothing for a week, kindly prodded him; he referred me to their legal page with reference to unapproved comments, and offered nothing more in the case of duplicate / irrelevant comments.

TypeQuantityComments
Dupes3Where one comment's URL has been listed twice as a "successful" comment
No URL1Comments where there's no link
No comment28Comment has not been approved / never submitted
Not relevant3Comments on irrelevant posts / blogs
OK56Successfully placed comments
Blank page1The comment URL goes to a blank page - broken site?
Ambiguous URL8Couldn't find the comment, URL was given to a large and busy blog instead of the individual post


I haven't reported on really short comments that bore no relevance; there were too many to account for, and BuyBlogComments.com already seemed to be doing so badly that I gave up trying to get this point corrected. They make up about 30%-40% of the comments that actually got published.

As for results: the site that was used for testing had an unusually great day for sales when the report arrived, easily making back the outlay on comments. However, we've seen less that 20 clicks to date from all the blog comments in total, over a four week period from placing the order. I'm not sure if the sales have any link to the comments; the referral URLs were from natural search and Wikipedia. There has been a small but noticeable boost for the term used for the blog comments, so that's a mild plus in favour of the service, too.

So, in summary;

Pros

  • Saves getting ones hands dirty with a freelancer
  • Delivery in under ten days
  • Cordial and professional support
  • Was cheap ($19.99 for "100" comments)
  • Possibly great for short term sales
  • Some SEO benefit
  • Site is easy to use

Cons

  • Almost 50% failure rate (only 56 out of 100 comments ever made it)
  • Comments are badly written (grammar and spelling mistakes)
  • Comments are often not relevant ("great post!" - a bot could apply this kind of content at a much lower rate; we're paying to avoid such a low quality level)
  • Not always applied to relevant blogs
  • Contact can be slow (took over a week from payment to delivery)
  • Some duplicate reporting means you won't even get as many comment submissions as you pay for(only 97 unique URLs were in my report, when there should've been 100)
  • Price has gone up ($24.99 for "100" comments; with the same success rate as I had, that's 45 cents a comment.)
  • Next to no traffic (would you click through to see the site behind comments this inconsequential?)


I won't be returning; the yield simply isn't high enough, and quality's not as expected.

10 comments:

Jon Waraas said...

Thanks for doing a review. We are still working hard to get all the details as perfect as we can. I dont really suggest buyblogcomments for traffic however, its more for seo. Did it help your seo rankings at all?

- Jon Waraas

Anonymous said...

Jon, you got initiative and still not much in market but other SEO opt it.

We are doing it for our in-house internet marketing campaign as we don’t deal with outsource business

How we maintain quality:
- Minimum 150 words comments, check spell and grammatically errors thru software

- Only 1 to 10 comments by one person (I know it will take long time to complete 100 but maintain quality which refers to brand)

- Comments allow not only in blog, do posts with press release website or where ever have option to post comment but only with trackback url

- Comments only allow in posts which relate to our business market

- We do it more carefully as we understand any bad views proof us fool in market

- Approval is 100% as you giving quality views to industry

- We follow quality check randomly that improves to our commenter and reader and action against bad player

Hope it will help you to improve your business, again its good initiative; I appreciate to make it selling but my consultation without cost.

Raj Kanojia

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

This is the main problem with all of these services. We initially had the same problems when we started, but decided to implement rigorous testing for all new hires and very strict penalties in case rules were broken. Finally we are getting quality that we always wanted. You can check us out at http://www.widecircles.com a new social media marketing solution.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the review. I was interested on buying their service and try to find out more about them from google. Now I'm not interested again. Thanks :)

Anonymous said...

I'm currently considering trying out buyblogcomments.com so thanks for such a thorough review. Has anyone else tried the service more recently and would you recommend it?

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

I just bought their new cheapest package - its $9.99 for 40 comments. I will leave my review here when it's complete.

Anonymous said...

This guy does not do the job he says he will. Waited a month for blog comments, yahoo answers & diggs etc. Nothing. Ignores emails. Does not do them in 7 days. Does not do them ever. Asked for refund last week - still no reply. He is a scammer who will take your money and then NOT do the job you have paid for. Stay away. Seriously. Please publish this so that others may not be scammed like I have been.

Outsource SEO said...

BuyBlogComments has proven ineffective for so many years. Its a scam that does not boost your rankings at all. You are better off with high PR forum posting or blog commenting.

 
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