Uno de Waal

Uno de Waal’s online space covering everything about web2.0, social networks and internet related developments in South Africa and how it fits in with the rest of the world.

Commenting on other blogs does not help SEO

Uno as Afrikaans, Ideas, Online

Jul|9|2007


There’s a thought meme that says that if you comment on other blogs, your PageRank or Google Juice will increase. This is not entirely true.

Google uses the rel=”noFollow” to exclude pages from being included in crawls. So when you link to another site and that link includes the rel=”noFollow” then essentially there isn’t any linklove happening.

Many people think that simply commenting on other blogs can increase your Google Juice, unfortunately most blogs still have the rel=”noFollow” tag embedded as default so that linklove is never transferred. This stems from the days when it was still difficult to track down spam, although tools like Akismet have been doing a brilliant job at it lately. Spammers would increase their Google Juice by spamming your site with comments linking back to their site. The idea is not to get you to click on it, but for the search engines to pick up on the referrer, getting them a higher SE ranking.

Essentially what this means is that your commentors are never rewarded for commenting. So people who comment on your site regularly don’t get any linklove. So why bother?

No Nofollow
Enter the No No Follow meme!
I’ve installed the No No Follow plugin ages ago, and actively encourage readers to leave comments (I’m still to hit the 40 comments a post mark, I’m working on it ok!). You do get rewarded with comments so go mad!

I haven’t found too many SA sites with the same meme running (only this?). How about it then folks? Open up the comment love!

For some background reading you can read:
Randy Clay Des
Bumpzee
Legal Andrew

(This post is actually about the noFollow meme and not SEO, although they are tightly linked)

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Ironically, I’ve had to close the comments on this post as I’ve received way too much spam that akismet doesn’t seem to block. There are tons of other posts to comment on though.



9 Responses

  1. JBagley

    09|Jul|2007

    I gotta agree Uno, more SA blogs should open up their comments to “following”. Obviously if you have a high percentage of comments per post, then maybe giving away too much Google juice might affect your PageRank, but for the most part, I think its a great way of rewarding your readers that comment.

    I’ve been slightly lazy, so I have only opened it up on problogging.co.za, but I will open up my other blogs as I get to them. Thanks for the reminder. ;-)

  2. Andrew Flusche

    09|Jul|2007

    I’ll jump in with a comment! Thanks a bunch for linking up to my article on comments.

    Best of luck,
    Andrew

  3. sessa

    10|Jul|2007

    Ehm, you must remember that referring traffic also plays a role in page authority. So, in effect, a rel=”nofollow” comment might not have link authority, but if the comment is on a popular post, you might benefit from an attractive CTR. Besides, if you have a blog with low authority, your no nofollow tags don’t help me much either :)

  4. Uno

    10|Jul|2007

    That’s now what I’m referring to though. Some marketers I’ve spoken to say “we’ll leave comments on other sites” but that doesn’t help. Also, if you are leaving comments on sites, it’s a good idea to have your own blog that you’re referring people to.

    And, I’m not entirely sure CTR on high volume blogs are so great. If the site you’re commenting on has 50 comments… are people clicking through?

    I’ve gotten some click throughs from comment’s I’ve made, but it’s not really enough to be a traffic stream.

  5. sessa

    10|Jul|2007

    I dunno, it depends. i’ve had some really nice CTR’s from certain sites. They all had 70-100 comments. It also depends on what your comment is. If it’s a good comment, you will get a lot of clickss

  6. Uno

    10|Jul|2007

    That’s true. Clikss ofcourse being a lot of “a lot of Clicks”. :)
    If you’re commentbaiting then you’re comments would be structured to get links back.

  7. Jan H

    16|Aug|2007

    I am not sure if discussion about the nofollow thing leads anywhere… I thought that nofollow really does what it says, however I was very surprised when my Google Sitemaps account shown me links including the nofollow value within regular links to my site!

    Am not saying that nofollow doesn’t exist for Google, but we don’t know how the rel attribute is treaten by Google. In addition, Yahoo shows those links as backlinks to URLs as well…

    Don’t take my comment badly, I am just thinking… if I had to choose between ordinary and nofollow link, I would select the first option naturally.

  8. SEO guru

    20|Sep|2007

    Yes. It’s still a problem, a lot of people keep their blogs “close”, because of the spammer. I don’t understand why. For example, my blog is always open for everyone (human), I know how protect it from spammers. You can simply use any code.

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