that's a good point. I suppose there's no way to tell on the surface... are most wp blogs nofollow by default?
intermend, Use Firefox and this addon. It will highlight "nofollow" links to make it easy to tell without looking at the page source. You can build PageRank slowly by posting to miscellaneous unrelated blogs but it won't help you rank for specific terms much. You want links from topically related websites. You want links on other sites where the content of the page (title / H1 / body / links) are related to your keyphrases. And finally, you want the links to use anchor text (not just one or two...variations) that target the keyword focused pages they point to. An example of links that don't help as much are forum links and blog comment links. They work, but takes massive quantities from lots of different domains. Forum and blog links generally don't help as much because the title / H1 / body of the page you place your link on is generally either 1) unrelated 2) the same for thousands of pages (ProPageRank Forum - Etc) 3) contains links on the same page from Viagra, gambling, travel, and 50 other types of sites that prevents the bot from establishing co-citation which really helps. Natural link building also means getting some deep links as you go so make sure to point your links to pages on your site that are the closest topically. It is always a good idea to identify the anchor text your competition is using on pages that outrank the ones you are building.
Posting a link to your website on blogs only affects your Google PageRank if the hyperlink does not have the rel="nofollow" attribute (a lot of blogs have "nofollow" links) and if you post a lot on such blogs. With or without the rel="nofollow" attribute, posting a link in the comments section will certainly drive traffic to your website (no guarantees about the amount of traffic though!). Here are few tools that you may find useful: BacklinkSpot - Search engine that searches specifically for blogs without the rel="nofollow" attribute. CommentHunt.com - Ditto search engine. Comment Kahuna - Software that searches for blogs without the rel="nofollow" attribute. The catch: lots of unsolicited emails when signing up (so I read). Courtney Tuttle's D-List - List of blogs have the rel="nofollow" link disabled in the comments.
Only if the comments themselves are helpful. I get attempts to get backlinks on my blog daily... but the content of those attempts is thus far has been little more then Check this out: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=55865 And thus far I've yet to actually allow one out of the queue, in fact, none of them have yet been even worthy of me checking them out. However, I have had a few people come in and give a little input and then link to their own blogs or sites, and if they ad some content to my blog, allowing them a link is the least I can do. Though, they need to be adding content! A you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours kind of thing. If you are doing it just to get a backlink, then chances are you are a no good spammer that'll find themselves blocked by askimet by the end of the day...
Search status is one cool tool! I have been using this addon for PageRank and Alexa. It's only now that I have discovered through you guys that you will be able to check "nofollow" sites using this tool. That makes it a much COOLER addon!!!
I have a 3 month old blog (retecool dot be) that's PR4. The domain only has backlinks from a couple of high PR do follow blogs. Sometimes getting PR is very easy, that's why it isn't important at all.
blog comments, even with do follow tag, will not have much affect on PR, as the number of links on page is too much for pages with comments
most have nofollow on links, ok Yahoo picks them up, but what is Yahoo, my point it not worth it, if you are not interested in a real talk.