Okay, I'm quite new to adding comments and including my website urls. Having said that, I'm quite confused about 2 things really. Situation a: <a target="_blank" title="http://www.grandtheftautoforever.com/" href="http://blog.muchmusic.com/mt-comments.cgi?__mode=red;id=47641">gta 5</a> What the heck does this mean? The comment urls are follow, and my url will show up in a new window, however, when you hover over my "name" in the comments, its quite an odd looking url. From the above code, am I wasting my time and this type of link is NOT passing along page rank? How would a search engine spider view that link or is it even a link? Situation b: One particular site I've posted on, I've added a href tags. Now in some instances the url works perfectly. Most times the url simply reverts back to the original page where my comments are from. The url is basically broken. I simply cannot figure out why sometimes it does work as a normal url and other times it doesn't. Are they utilizing some anti linking code? It seems sporatic and it's been bothering me. Perhaps I should just give up? It's a cherry site and honestly it's worth my while. Having said that, perhaps somebody can enlighten me on this. Note: I'm not a spammer! I am just being smart about building traffic to my site now. I always add useful content to comments. Just letting you know that. Thanks!
The url that you entered in the comments is being re-formatted to pass through the site's cgi script which is in no way adding any link juice to your url in the comments. So, rather than following this approach, I feel that it would be better if you can just go around the blogs in your niche and post valid comments on them. Just an opinion. Let's wait for pros to answer this. I too would be waiting for an answer.
Yes that 'odd looking url' is setup that way so the blog can track their outgoing traffic. Links like this do not help your rankings or PR. There is no way around this. In your second situation, some blogs allow html code in their comments and some do not. For the ones that do not allow it, sometimes they take the html code out completely and sometimes they turn all of the html into text. In some cases their form doesn't allow html but it will automatically link urls. So you might end up with a url like http://www.domain.com/">blah</a>. If you are unsure of what form of comments a blog accepts, browse through their previous comments to see if there are links with anchor text or if it is only auto-linked urls.
Thank you for your replies. I needed to mention in situation a. The "name" field when a url is added, shows that the link is dofollow. I think you're saying its not good, but possibly it showing dofollow makes the link pass rank? On the second situation, the website itself isn't a blog, but the site accepts comments. A pop up window opens where you fill in the information. I've added a href in the comment box, and like I said, the link when I view the source looks completely fine. When hovering, it shows the url of the page, then adds the url that I posted on the end of it. It's basically broken up. Then of course, on a few occasions the links work completely as designed. They show and link to my a href correctly. It's quite puzzling still to me. I've analyzed the page to see why sometimes it will and sometimes it won't work properly. It's the same site and same form, so surely it must stay consistent but it doesn't. Could it be a moderator doing something to my links? Sometimes the mods miss the url and it gets through? EDIT: Also I've noticed that on the pages where I've added a href which ends up broken, the page shows the page error icon in IE. I'm one of these people who likes to understand why things are the way they are. I think hearing your thoughts on this, will help me when discovering other sites with similar odd url linking. Thanks very much.