When I post in a forum and my name is linked to my site is that a legitimate backlink and will it help me get listed on searchengines? New to SEO any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
As long as the forum is serach engine friendly then yes. To get maximum benefit though you should post in forums that are on the same topic as your site.
what about posting comments on blogs like joystiq.com? Are those links search engine freindly? Also, I bought 1000 hits of "exit traffic" to increase traffic to my site in hopes that it would get my site listed on google. Was that a waste of money or will it help my PR/ SEO process. Thanks.
It depends on the blog, a large number of blogs use rel=nofollow to combat comment spam, so they won't do you much good apart from the traffic that they send. Bought traffic is almost always a waste of money, there's a reason why people sell it rather than making money out of it themselves. It certainly won't help with SEO.
if you get listed in Dmoz you will automaticaaly listed in no. of directoires who are using Dmoz data
This is debatable. I've seen several blog posts on the nofollow tag and how google bot along with other bots will still follow the link even though its in place. I've also seen several experiments listed here on dp of people trying it and they were still followed. Plus, whether or not there is a nofollow tag, ifyou post on poplular blogs in your topic and get in the first couple of comments, it can help you with traffic some and its highly targeted. Most people goto about the 10-15 comment before stopping, so you want to try to get in before that number. Hope that helps! PS. I'm too lazy to find the dp posts about the nofollow tag...just do a search
see here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php with your unique & Quality Content for Users. Good luck!
Comments tagged nofollow may well be crawled, but they won't do you any good in terms of boosting rankings. Also, a disproportionate number of blog comments, forum and guestbook links don't bode well for a healthy link profile.
Have SEO friendly URL's with sites catagories and topics with keywords relating to your site. Provide meta tags for all articles, produce unique content.
I'm not saying its the best link idea out there, but even Aaron Walls mentions it in his Ebook SEO Book as a good way to increase traffic to your site. Also, there have been numerous reports of how pagerank was passed to a site from one link that had a nofollow attribute on it. I totally agree with you that its not a great link building technique. I'm just saying I'm unsure that Google actually doesn't give weight to page even when you link with a nofollow attribute. I will try to find some of the sources I read about it and post them here in a few minutes, I'll edit this post in a few if I can find them. Thanks. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006800.html http://dylan.tweney.com/2006/05/26/googles-embarrassing-mistake/ http://www.linkcondom.com/ I can find plenty more...but once again I'm lazy. Easy to find this stuff. Once again, I'm not saying these people are right or that anyone here is wrong. I honestly don't know if it truely works or not. My advice however is that if you don't want pr or rankings passes to another site just don't link to them...Simple as that. I would rather be safe than my pr being passes to a site I don't want it to. For example, I see so many bloggers that don't moderate their comments because all the links have the nofollow attribute....Are you really gonna base having a good blog on whether or not the nofollow attribute truely works??? I wouldn't. And besides the nofollow tag, this crap just makes your blog look horrible... Stop relying on the nofollow tag so much people and take some time to actually create something with quality instead of always taking the easy ways. I personally moderate every single comment that comes to my blogs. I don't use nofollow on them as people that actually do comment deserve a link to their site. They are helping you, yet you want to stick it to them with a nofollow...Lazy people today! Just my 2 cents. PS. None of this is meant for you Matt, I just talking in General, as I said I'm not disagreeing with you that nofollow tags don't pass pr, I'm just syaing they do more harm than good in my eyes.