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Improve Your SEO Efforts By Leaving Comments
By Randy The Hermit Baustert | February 7, 2009
Most of you probably already know that you can boost your search engine rankings by getting back inks to your site, but how many of you are using blog comments to get back links?
Those of you that aren’t using blog comments for back link have probably heard some on tell you about no follow tags and how the search engines won’t follow the link from comment on blogs.
It is true that the search engines usually won’t follow links with the no follow tag. But more and more you are finding blog that have disabled the no follow tag in the comments section.
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.
Before I get into what to look for to find blogs without the no follow tag I want to cover comment 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 personally have my comments set up so that if you put links in the body of the comment it will go to moderation and not be posted until I get around to reviewing the links. This might be done quickly or it might take me a week to get to it. Remember, some people never check the comment moderation.
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?
There are a number of reasons why you should do this:
1.People will see your comments and your links even if there is a no follow tag. If you put 4 comments on blogs per day you will end up with over 1,500 links in a year. These links will be seen by potentially tens of thousands of readers that might visit your site.
2.If you comments adds value to the topic of the post the author and readers will start to recognize your name and you will be branding yourself as an expert.
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.
If comments have the no follow tag activated how do you tell?
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.
Once this is installed all no follow links will be highlighted in red so they are easy to notice. If the link (the name) in the blog comment isn’t highlighted that mean the no follow is shut off for the comments 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 checks the name and email address to see if this person has ever commented before and keeps track of all the ones that match. If you use different names (which has already been pointed out as a no no) or different emails you will never have the no follow tags removed.
Most commonly this is set at 3 to 5 posts before the no follow tags are removed but the blog master can set if from 3 to a million if they like.
You might now be wondering how you find blogs that are using Lucia’s Linky Love, the easiest way to do this is to go to Google’s Blogsearch and search for your keywords in quotes plus Lucia’s Linky in quotes (it should look like this “keyword phrase”+”Lucia’s Linky” ) and you should find some posts for your keywords that this will apply to.
I use this on my blogs and I have it set at three. Because I read the comments and if they are spammy I delete them manual link spammers never get the three links they need. This encourages better comments and more comments.
Topics: Search Engine Optimization |