The tremendous growth of websites and blogs just in the last two years has made it even more difficult for a site to rise to the top of search engines.
With the continuing rise in the importance of backlinks for SEO, website owners are exhausting every tactic to get backlinks to their site. Some of these tactics are considered Black Hat and others are legitimate.
Blog Comments as a Backlink Strategy
Blog commenting is an easy, yet effective way to achieve backlinks. But many blog owners are getting p*ssed off at all the spammy comments that this tactic has created on their blog. At least it seems.
Has the backlash against spammers swung so far to one side, even legitimate commenters have lost the do follow love (or luv)?
What is do follow love… and how can you lose it?
For those who do not know the difference between no follow and do follow, the most basic explanation goes something like this: links with a “no follow” attribute (including URL’s in the comments) means these links are not followed by search engines.
In other words, search engines do not count these as backlinks. They don’t see them. Even though readers can see the links and click on them, they are invisible to search engines. Therefore, there is no benefit for SEO purposes.
In that way, you lost the do follow luv – the SEO benefit of placing a link on a high-valued website.
Well, one way to take away the luv is to make your comments and links on your website all no follow.
Why Would Someone Make Their Blog No Follow?
This is a question I would like to ask the audience.
There are those blog owners who don’t realize that WordPress makes comments automatically nofollow unless they install a do follow plugin. Their blogs have always been no follow and no one pointed that out, or they don’t care to change it.
However, this question is addressed to the bloggers who have changed their blog to no follow.
If you look at dofollow directories, or blog posts with lists of do follow blogs, many of the sites that are listed are no longer dofollow. So something changed. Why?
No one wants spam!
True. But with spam filters, captcha, and comment moderating, why would you need to take that extra step and add the no follow attribute? And then punish EVERYONE who comments. I have even seen the Comment Luv link as no follow! An old saying that addresses universal punishment says, “When someone sh*ts, we all wear diapers.”
I understand it is not really a “punishment” as comments are meant to be engaging and all that. Okay, sure. I agree. Every blogger wants engaging comments and interaction with the readers. But let’s be realistic, there is also the added benefit of increasing your own site’s search engine rankings.
I rather manually moderate my comments anyhow – including the URL’s that are put in the comments. Maybe my blog doesn’t get enough comments to worry about it.
Another Option to Give A Little Bit of Luv to Legitimate Blog Commenters
The No Follow attribute certainly has its place. Should it be across the board? Instead of making all comments no follow, I have noticed that a few blog owners use a plugin that will add the do follow attribute after ‘x’ number of comments.
For example, after leaving 5 comments on a blog, you get rewarded with a do follow tag. This seems a little bit more reasonable. At least loyal readers and commenters are getting some SEO juice back to their site. These plugins can also block certain keywords and emails.
Has this not caught on as an option? Maybe there are other reasons to add no follow. I’d like to know, and I am sure other readers would to.
Article by Julie McElroy
Julie is a freelance writer providing web content, articles, press releases, and more. She is also a web consultant for those wanting a bit more than content.
I normally write at http://www.inspiredtowrite.com