Blog Comment Demon – software review

I have just bought the Blog Comment Demon software. It cost $47. Setting it up was simple.

I did some research before I bought it; I read about 20 blog posts and watched a couple of videos on YouTube. Most of the posts had good things to say and the posts that did not have good things to say where not exactly scathing.

What does it do and how can you use it?
Blog Comment Demon searches for blog posts that are related to the search terms you are interested in. The returned results provide you with several pieces of information: the url, the top level domain (.com, .net etc), the domain PageRank, the post PageRank, the type of tag (nofollow, dofollow or unknown), the number of comments already on the post, the number of outgoing links on the page, the estimated publication date and the page title.

The main purpose of BCD is to help you locate blog posts where you can leave comments and gain an inbound link to your own website or blog.

Is it ethical to locate link opportunities using Blog Comment Demon?
In my opinion it depends upon how you use the software. Inside BCD there is an ‘Auto Form Filler’ area which can be pre-filled with your name, your email address and your comment. You can choose to automatically fill in the comment fields on the blog posts you come across or you can hit the ‘fill’ button when you find a blog where you just want to leave a generic comment. If this option is used I would suggest that Blog Comment Demon is being used as a spamming tool.

If, however, you take the time to read the blog post and make a related comment, I would say it is a very useful tool for a) finding useful links b) finding blogs you may not ordinarily come across c) extending your online network.

When I performed my first couple of searches I had a plan in mind; post a few comments to quickly gain an incoming link. What I actually found myself doing was spending quite a bit of time reading other posts. I did leave a comment on some of them, and I added a few of the RSS feeds to my reader. The number of people I follow on Twitter also grew.

This morning, not quite 24 hours after I bought the software, I have made a total of nine comments. Six have been accepted, two and are still awaiting moderation and one has been rejected. The one that was rejected was on a blog I really liked and hadn’t come across before. The blog is related to web design.

Choosing which posts to target
The problem with most blogs is that they use the nofollow tag on comment links, this stops link juice from filtering through to the linked to page. Blog Comment Demon has a ‘tag’ column. It tells you if the blog post page is nofollow, dofollow or unknown. In my tests so far I have come across very few dofollow blog posts (this doesn’t surprise me), but there are plenty that are nofollow or unknown. The nofollow/unknown tags shouldn’t stop you from commenting if the post is a good one, as you could still gain some traffic if you have something interesting to say.

I used the following method when selecting which posts to read – When there were no dofollow posts listed, I ordered the list by PageRank of the top level domain and then extended the ‘Title of Web Page’ column so I could read the full title. If the title sounded interesting and relevant, I followed the link and read the post and made a few comments.

Some of the features of Blog Comment Demon

Create ‘projects’ for different sites/niches
Make comments without leaving the program or open the page in a browser
Change the preferences to make Blog Comment Demon more search engine friendly
Change the search criteria to suit your needs (minimum PageRank, dofollow only, age of post etc)
Choose to use a proxy server or use the same proxy settings as Internet Explorer
Export the search data to Excel

In Conclusion
I was a little concerned that BCD wouldn’t deliver, but I have been very impressed with it so far. I have only been using it for less than a day and haven’t seen the results of its use in the long term, but, as this stage I would highly recommend it.

I will write a further article once I have been using it for a few weeks.

Blog Comment Demon