Blog Comments for SEO Backlinks
Using blog comments to generate backlinks to your site is becoming more and more prevalent.
There are a lot of people out there that will tell you don’t bother to use blog comments because all the blogs have no follow tags now and the search engines don’t record the links.
There is a trace of truth to this but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use blog comments to get backlinks because there are some blogs that don’t have the no follow tags on their comments.
WordPress by default adds the no follow tags to the comment section but there are people that will remove the no follow tags from your comments in return for you leaving comments. Believe it or not there is a way you can find these blogs with a search.
Go out and post your comments on these blogs but before you do I want to make sure you aren’t leaving spammy comments so here is some blog comments etiquette.
If you are going to leave a comment on the blog MAKE SURE the comment is relevant to the post.
If the post you are commenting on is about writing articles you don’t want to leave a comment about extreme sports. If you site is extreme sports related you can have the link to your site but the comment text needs to be related to the post.
You shouldn’t put a link in the body of your comment unless it is directly related to the post and is information that won’t fit in the comment itself, such as a video.
I recommend that you set your blog up so that if there are links in the body of the comment it will go to the comment moderation. This way you will have to approve the comment before it shows up on your blog. This will keep the spammy comments of your blog.
The name field for the comment form should only be filled with your name or moniker and a moniker should only be used if it describes you or your business accurately. Don’t stuff the name with keywords if you start doing this you might have some blog masters ban you and put you on the spam lists. You can have keywords in your moniker but only if they apply (as stated above) to you personally or your business but you are always better of using a name that can be used to recognize you.
That is a general overview of blog etiquette but you should never do anything in a blog comment that you wouldn’t want done on your blog. Even with the no follow tags you should still be posting comments, I bet you are wondering why?
This question can be given a few answers, such as:
1.It is still a link to your site that people will see and possibly follow. If you leave 5 blog comments per day that is 1,500 links in a year that might catch the eye of the reader and could get you traffic.
2.If you are posting relevant comments people will remember your name and you will start to build a reputation for yourself, especially if you only used one name.
3.If your comment is informative you will also find that a lot of the readers will click on your link to find out more about you.
4.Just because the major search engines abide by the no follow tag doesn’t mean everybody does. The last time I checked Ask would follow no follow tags and there are some ad services that do their own back link testing that will follow these links and this could raise the amount you collect for showing their ads.
Now how to tell if the comments have the no follow tag applied to them.
The most obvious way is to find a comment and look at the page source, pour through all the code looking for the link on the name and seeing if the no follow tag is in the link. This will drive you crazy if you do it a lot of times but it does work.
A better way is to use an addon for the FireFox or Flock browser (these are the browsers you should be using). This addon is called SEO for FireFox it is provided by SEOTools.com or you can find it by searching for SEO for FireFox addon in Google.
This addon will give you a bunch of information that can be used for SEO but the one feature that we are interested in now is the no follow highlighting. What it does is look at all the links on the page your viewing and highlights all the no follow links in red. If the name in the blog comment isn’t red then the no follow is shut off on that blog.
People that run WordPress blogs want you to leave comments and they don’t want spam comments so a lot of them have started using a plugin that rewards the people that comment frequently, this plugin is called Lucia’s Linky Love.
How it works it the owner of the blog can set the plugin so that after so many posts the no follow tag is removed from the comments of that person.
It does require that you use the same name and the same email address for every comment (I believe I mentioned using the same name above).
The blog master gets to choose the number of comments it takes to qualify for no follow tag removal, the minimum number is 3 and the maximum is whatever they feel like. I usually see it set between 3 and 5 which means you have to make 4 to 6 post before you get a back link to your site.
Now I bet you want to know how this will help you when you are leaving comments. You can actually find posts that are using Lucia’s Linky Love but doing a search in Googles Blogsearch. Put your keyword phrase in quotes then a plus sign (+) then in quotes Lucia’s Linky and you should find posts on topic that use this plugin. Make the minimum number of comments plus 1 and you now have start creating back links followed by all the search engines.
On the blogs I use this on you will need to post 4 times to get a link back to your site. I read the comments and I delete the spammy ones so the people just trying to get the right number of posts never make it. This encourages more comments and usually adds good information.
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