nofollow links from blog comments

[adresanet]

Hello,

one of the sites I work have links in comments from 40-50 blogs.
The links are made under a person name, not a keyword. Most of these links are nofollow. Should I place them in a disavow file if are nofollow or if them are nofollow won't contribute to penguin ?

[Clay_More]

Three aspects.

First. Links from outside blogs with the links having anchor text as a person's name won't be an issue.

Second. Crap comments are just that. Blog owners will spot it, search engines have seen it, there's no point in doing it.

Third. Nofollow technically means search engines will not follow a link. Putting nofollow links in a disallow file is redundant.

If you have someone commenting on blogs using their name as the anchor text but a site as the anchor that's pretty much what the web has been based on.

[petehall]

If you have someone commenting on blogs using their name as the anchor text but a site as the anchor that's pretty much what the web has been based on.

Please elaborate as you have confused me.

[n0tSEO]

andresanet,

Google treats disavowed links like nofollow links (aka, it ignores them), so there's no point in disavowing them if they are already nofollowed.

There's more about this at Google's blog: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

If you have a comment policy on your blog, make it clear that you won't accept crappy or blatantly spammy URLs in comments, even if there's a real person's name as an anchor text.

If the URLs are legit and under a person's name, though, this is a good thing, because they adds to the conversation (and blogs have always been a conversational medium).

Hope that helps. :)

[Shai]

The answer to your question wholly depends if the blogs are real helpful blogs with matching quality comments that are there to raise real debate about the blog post rather than just for the sake of the link.

So, if the blogs are involved in a real discussion and the person posting is making a proper and valid contribution to the discussion, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having your name linked to your site.

However, if the blog is of the type I suspect you are hinting at; i.e full of spammy comments such as "great blog and I agree with you" with the name filled in as "seo company" linking to your website, then I would disavow EVEN if they are NOFOLLOW.

Yes, I know there is not much point as they are NOFOLLOW and all the disavow does is turn links to NOFOLLOW but if you ever get a manual review, having those links in the disavow file can demonstrate your desire to be disassociated with those blog comments and in turn save you from manual penalty. For the sake of the 5 minutes it takes to add the domains to a disavow file, I would always err on the side of caution and play safe.

[Clay_More]

@petehall

http://example.com with the anchor text "My Name"

I probably could have stated that better.

[EditorialGuy]

However, if the blog is of the type I suspect you are hinting at; i.e full of spammy comments such as "great blog and I agree with you" with the name filled in as "seo company" linking to your website, then I would disavow EVEN if they are NOFOLLOW.

Better yet, delete the comments, or--best of all--moderate the blog so junk comments never appear.

[adresanet]

The comments aren't made on my blogs. The comments were made on other blogs with links to my site

[n0tSEO]

adresanet, I didn't get that before. Thanks for making it clear. :)

That changes the cards. If these comments were not posted by you or one of the blog team, then they are most probably spam comments.

Before you disavow them, I would advise you to contact the bloggers and let them know that they have spam comments on their posts linking back to your site (no blogger likes spam/fake comments, so I think they'll be happy to remove them).

[petehall]

@Clay_More thank you for the clarity. :)

[adresanet]

Well, most of the comments were made back in 2011.
Most of them are "half-spamm" - a very short comment somehow related to the subject.
Most of them are in pages with less than 20 comments, usually up to 10 comments.
My site never received email in GWT with "Unnatural links".
When Penguin was released for the first time, in April 2012, my site wasn't affected hardly. +- 10% changed.
So I am not sure my site is hit by Penguin, Panda or something else, I just try to eliminate as much causes I can.

Also my site has some (about 40-50) links from web directories from 2007-2008. Can those be a cause ? My niche is extremely hard so I don't intend to get top10 in google with any of the main keywords, I am interested more in long tail kw. But I can't get them...

I am not very sure if I should remove all those directories and comments as my site will remain without backlinks and from my own experience with other site which received manual penalization, after I removed all unnatural links my visitors were much less than were even with manual penalization.

Total number of backlinks to homepage shown by GTW is 350.
Looking to ahrefs anchor cloud for homepage only I see something like this:

name1 used in comment - 30 domains - 19%
keyword1: 18 domains - 11%
2 terms keyword: 11 domains - 7%
name2 used in comment: 10 domains - 6%
site name - 10 domains - 6%
site-name - 7 domains - 4%
www.sitename - 7 domains - 4%
other 2 term kw: 6 domains - 4%
and so on....

[Clay_More]

Name1 used in comment - 19%
Name2 used in comment - 6%

So 1/4 of the backlinks are comments. If most are nofollow, then 25% of the backlinks might be considered less than optimal.

I hate to use PR as a tool, but I'm going to anyway. Most blog comments are on abandoned, ignored sites where everyone and their brother throws links at the site. So comments are laced with pr0n, diet, pharma. Not really the best place to be noticed. Most of those pages won't actually have any page rank and there isn't much value to them unless you are doing a lot of linking in bulk.
Starting with a link from a PR0 page.
A link from a PR1 page would be worth something like 8 times as much.
A link from a PR2 page would be worth something like 64 times as much.
A link from a PR3 page would be worth something like 512 times as much.
A link from a PR4 page would be worth something like 4096 times as much.

People have beat the math up enough times before that I'm not going to go there. It's better, and actually easier to get higher quality links rather than lots of low quality links.

[Planet13]

If you have time, I would disavow them.

I understand they are NOFOLLOW today, but will they still be nofollow tomorrow?

People with blogs do all sorts of crazy things, including installing plugins that make nofollow links in comments to dofollow links automatically.

Sometimes they keep their content the same but switch over their sites from one platform to another, and the new platform DOESN'T add nofollow to the links.

[Shai]

Good post Planet13. Yet another good reason to disavow even nofollowed links.

[Clay_More]

There is a huge difference between Betty's Biscuit Blog and core sites that really are the beginning points for trust and authority on the internet. One high trust/authority link from a relevant site will more than outweigh effects from a sprinkling of borderline links. It's an important difference.

I'll disavow a site, but I'd never disavow an individual link. You all missed Matt Cutts saying it's a machete tool, not a scalpel?