Blog Commenting - The Lost Art

I'll be adding a short video about that to our blog later on this week. It's easier than you think and what started out as a potentially sneaky tactic has actually evolved into something fairly "white hat". Once the video is up I'll post a link to it here.

 

The actual facts are that a rel="nofollow" will not prevent a spider from crawling a page or in fact counting it as a backlink. What nofollow does is basically saying "Dont trust this link" so dont pass any link juice or PR. Nofollow was introduced in 2005 by a collaboration by the major search engines headed by Google and Blogger.com. It started out for the precise reason to combat blog comment spam.

If you want to stop a search engine spider from actually crawling a certain page, it should be defined used Robot Exclusion Standard (robot.txt).

However different search engines interpret nofollow differently.

Google
Uses the link for ranking? No
Follows the link? Yes
Indexes the "linked to" page? No
Shows the existence of the link? Only for a previously indexed page
In results pages for anchor text? Only for a previously indexed page

Yahoo
Uses the link for ranking? No
Follows the link? Yes
Indexes the "linked to" page? Yes
Shows the existence of the link? Yes
In results pages for anchor text? Yes

Bing
Uses the link for ranking? No
Follows the link? Yes
Indexes the "linked to" page? Yes
Shows the existence of the link? No
In results pages for anchor text? Only for a previously indexed page

 

Great post but one thing....isn't there always?

What you've highighted above are the official view points and position not what is actually happening in fact. Too many studies have emerged now to not necessarily discredit this viewpoint but certainly to ask enough questions as to doubt it's vailidity.

When someone takes a keyphrase and manages to get a blog to rank well in Google, Yahoo and Bing (and at No 1) by only posting comments on Blogs that are techincally "nofollow" one does have to ask the question "'ello ello, whats goin' on 'ere then?"

I think the real reason for this happening is that by playing around with tags, attributes and gerrymandering techniques, Google have deliberately skewed results and therefore thrown the whole process into question? What do they do about it? They are hardly likely to turn round and say "Hi folks, we got it wrong. You know that attribute we insisted you all install? Well actually we've gone too far and now we’ve change our mind?”

Not going to happen is it?

So what do they do? Like with Page Rank, they quietly stop trumpeting about it and let it sink and move on and hope we all do the same....

 

For me i always try and put at least two lines of text and ensure that my comment is enhancing the page or post in some way, i am continuously seeing people commenting on blog posts by just saying 'great post' or 'I completely agree'. I think all these posts should be deleted!!!

 

After reading comments here... I'm not sure about what is PRIMARY intent behind blog commenting? Is it the quality backlinks that you generate for your website? or That you interact & share your views along with spreading a word about your business/website? Or you generate traffic from it?

 

I believe blog commenting is only relevant as long as it renders new perspectives on the topic discussed. So I prefer to go for fewer and better blog comments, rather than having a contextual opinion on every single blog post I come across.

 

i use blog commenting a lot and brings good traffic