Webmaster Tools shows blog backlinks: are they helping?

My comments on others' blogs show link to my site

[sublime1]

I have a blog. I comment on other blogs, and occasionally there's an option to list your own website, so I do. In looking through the links on Webmaster Tools (aka Sitemaps), I see most of these links are listed.

But do they do me any good? Certainly not in terms of keywords ... but what about trust rank? Seems improbable, but I had to ask, especially, since some of them are from comments I made on Matt Cutts' blog :-)

Thx

[tedster]

Google has a secret formula for how they "weight' various types of links. And recently Matt mentioned that they changed this formula. I'd still bet that blog backlinks do offer a little help - but any backlink profile needs diversity to help the domain in a significant way.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google maintains a list of abandoned blogs that are totally spammed out, and zeroes them out totally in weighting links. At the same time, links in well maintained blogs surely could offer some pop - but I'd guess there's more weight if the link is in the actual blog entry and not so much if it's in the comments.

[sublime1]

Thanks tedster -- do you think the indexers are smart enough to identify blog comments as somehow different (assuming no other markup like rel="nofollow")?

[trakkerguy]

BTW, Matt's blog is "external nofollow"...

[tedster]

do you think the indexers are smart enough to identify blog comments as somehow different

Not 100% correct right now, given the different types of blogs and blog software. But certinaly the common stuff, with little or no customization, is easy to identify.

But I do think Google is looking hard at the "type of source" and they're getting better at identifying and categorizing as time goes by. I know I would work at this if I ran a search engine. There's a huge difference between a link to a domain that the domain owner can place on their own, and a link from another site that is given freely and independently.