I've never really been that big on using comments to create links, or at least I do not go out looking for blogs specifically to post comments. However, if I am already on a blog anyway and have actually read the post, I will usually leave a comment with a link. I typically do this under 5 times a day...nothing major. What I use to do was just point directly to my home page for the link, and use my site name as the anchor text. However, I've been doing something a little different lately and wanted opinions on whether this is a good thing or a screw up idea. Essentially, what I've been doing is tailoring the link to match the content of the article I am commenting on. For example, if it is a post about something hockey related, I'll point a link to my hockey page and put "Hockey News" (or similar) as the anchor text. If it is a basketball article, I will point it to my basketball page, football to my football page, etc, etc. The only time I really link to my front page is if it is a general sports article that I can't fit into another segment. So, now I'm building links to a lot of different areas of my site, which are all better related to the page the link appears on. But at the same time, I'm spreading my links a little thin and do not get very many to the front page. Is this the right thing to do, or should I go back to just sending everything to the home page?
The only way to answer that question properly is with stats. Since you have started doing things this way, has your traffic through those comment links increased or decreased? Personally, I'd go the way you're going. Search engines are picky with comment links, so the human element is far more important than the technical - someone seeing an appropriate bit of anchor text is, in my opinion, more likely to click.
This is a good way to do this, but I would go with something much more related to your article page. Just HOCKEY NEWS is a bad anchor text to use. Be much more specific! This is a high competition keyword, go with something like LOW or MEDIUM as with comments only you won't be able to get a good ranking!
Thanks. I appreciate the replies. I haven't really done it enough to measure if there are more clicks coming through. I started doing it this way initially because I wanted to try to improve page authority on different levels of the site, with hopes that it would eventually bump up the overall domain authority. I chose generic text like hockey news, football news, etc, because I was just pointing to generic news landing pages. Maybe I should change that though and point to specific articles so that I can play around with less generic/more specific anchor text. Thanks for the tip.