With regards to blog comments as a source of backlinks, what are your views on the life of the backlink. How long does it count for? Does it lose its effectivness with age. The same question applies to forum links in signatures. How long will the link be counted as a backlink. How many pages must it drop before it dies.
Lifetime? Quite the opposite. Backlinks gain value with age. For as long as you keep the link in your signature.
I would have to disagree and say that forum and blog backlinks often degrade over time. Eventually the page your link is on gets pushed into the archives and becomes further away from the website's homepage. These backlinks would only gain value if they were on a popular thread or post that generated backlinks of its own. So most of these kinds of links would lose value based on when the page is archived. With a blogpost it is as long as the post is on the blog's homepage. The links are still valuable after they get archived, but likely not as valuable as when they were originally posted.
So links on internal pages (not homepage) lose weight over time? Does Google expect all links to stay on the homepage? It doesn't make much sense to me. So pretty much every baclink we build is a waste of time?
Geez...I think you took my disagreement personally. I'm not saying that link building is a waste of time. I'm just saying that links count for more when they are less clicks from the homepage. It is the same as the PR distribution principal. The further away from the homepage, the lower the PR. Of course links built to internal pages can offset this, but most posts don't get many backlinks.
Not at all. I'm sorry if my post sounds like that. I believe Google treats sites and blogs pretty much the same way. And I know a lot of webmasters who prefer to build backlinks from internal pages rather than sitewide backlinks because it looks more natural and the SERP results are quite good too. I agree with you on the fact that homepage backlinks are better, but I don't think that's what allcart is asking for. Seems to me the question is more like: 1. Let's say I comment on some blog post related to my site (found via Google, so probably not on the homapage). 2. Would my link waste value over time? Now I think in this situation your link will actually gain value.
I think you are both making interesting points, even if they are opposing opinions. My thoughts are that if I post a comment, or start a thread on a photography forum with a link in the sig (I think we all realise what my niche is) then Yahoo will give a backlink based purely on the fact that my link exists. The fact that it is prominent on page 1 of that particular part of the forum and easily seen by crawlers etc will be a bonus to me. Now, as the thread drops down the pages and becomes less visible I wondered if eventually it would not be counted at all. I thought that maybe the same would apply to blog comments, but thinking about Zexy's comment, it may be that links gained from blog commenting may gain strength due to the self perpetuating nature of the blogs.
I don't think the links would eventually not be counted at all. It's more a matter that those links will eventually not count as much. Many people notice temporary jumps in rankings due to links from forums, blogs and social bookmarking. Those people often notice the rankings slipped back down slightly if more promotion is not continued. If the blogpost or forum post is popular enough to gain links then your link would gradually climb in value.
Yes, that makes perfect sense to me. It only goes to reinforce the opinion that its better not only to comment on relevant blogs, but to comment on the best blogs. The reason for this thread is that when I check my links with Yahoo, they seem to go up and down in number, so I thought perhaps the older links were not being counted. It also seems that posting in forums and commenting on blogs is a part of link building that cannot be ignored. It won't help if we get lazy.
Myth making at its best. PageRank is strictly a numerical value given to a page on the web, which is based on the number of and value of the links pointing to the page. If the page only has links from its site home page, then yes, the further away, the less value. But if the page is gaining links from third-party websites, the number of clicks from the homepage is not relevant to the page's PageRank.
Thanks for taking my quote out of context If you read my whole post you would see that I mentioned that links to internal pages can offset this. It is a generalized statement to say the further from the homepage, the lower the PR. Unfortunately this is the structure of most websites. Too many webmasters don't bother building backlinks to their internal pages. Most website's internal pages are not good enough to attract many natural backlinks either.
Ah, now don't tell me you are taking my comments personally. I did not intend to pull you out of context. You are right on this. Few people look beyond their homepage when building links, which is why so many fail to produce the results they want to produce.
I get a lot of my traffic from comments on sites that are directly related to the topic of the site I am linking back to. More than Organic Search traffic on some of them. So if you are going to comment blogs why not make it worth your while and target content related to yours and make your linkbacks stick. A high quality blog archive will be indexed for as long as the site is relevant and useful in the eyes of the search engines. IMHO Forum links are much less valuable in that they seem to be buried on pages that are much less useful as the size of the forum grows. Many Forums also use dynamic URL's that are very long and would tend to not be crawled over as they grow in age.
Backlinks gains value with their age if taken from a relevant site. Forum signatures are not very beneficial to get you rankings.