Does google ignore blog comment links?

[dethfire]

I have come across a very successful site and I looked them up on ahrefs and I found they had an unusual amount of EDU backlinks. I checked the links and found they took advantage of thousands of professor blogs that had guest commenting. Usually these are international. I wonder if google has caught on or is giving credit to these EDU blog spammers? Apparently it still works considering the site is doing so well. thoughts?

[FranticFish]

If the guest links are 'dofollow' then it's certainly a possibility.

Another is that if the site in question is spamming then it's possible that they have links from a network of sites designed to boost rankings, and that link discovery bots are banned from the network to confuse other SEOs. You could well be looking at only a fraction of the site's links compared to what Googlebot sees.

[Planet13]

Definitely check if they are nofollow or whether they could flow page rank.

But if they do flow page rank, that would probably be a prim candidate for the types of links that google WANTS to devalue / punish.

Another is that if the site in question is spamming then it's possible that they have links from a network of sites designed to boost rankings, and that link discovery bots are banned from the network to confuse other SEOs.

Good Point!

In that case, the only way to find those links would be to use google, I think.

[rajeshth02]

As per my own research their is nothing and relation between Google and blog comments. Comments are treated as spamming, so comments will not a good idea for Google ranking, It can't help for better ranking but definitely it can drop your ranking if doing with bad way.

[Planet13]

"It can't help for better ranking but definitely it can drop your ranking if doing with bad way."

I would disagree somewhat.

I would say that in some instances, it CAN help quite well for ranking purposes - if done correctly.

But it would appear in my experience that it can lead to problems later on.

The secret is knowing exactly which sites to comment on - and no, I ain't telling ;)

The problem is, those links will almost certainly become Penguin fodder eventually.

[bluntforce]

I have a one page "site" that currently ranks 25 out of 2.5 million results for it's keyphrase. The only links are comments.

I have a three page site, each page is a totally different subject and links out to a relevant page on that subject owned by someone else. My site doesn't rank for any keyphase, but one of the "linked to" pages bumped up around 8 spots for the keyphrase shortly after the link. The other two subjects are probably too competitive. Again, the only links to my site are comment links.

NOTE: Care was taken to make sure pages I was linking to weren't the main focus of those sites and if I noticed any negative effect I'd immediately pull the link.

For those sites, I'm currently measuring how long it takes ranking to degrade knowing that comment links have a limited life effectiveness.