Blog Links

Are they valued less

[jsnow]

I read in another post that blog links are somehow devalued by Google, is this true?

[Gory]

The word is that blog links are not taken in account by Google.

[troels nybo nielsen]

That would really surprise me. I was under the impression that one of my websites had its PR and its positions in SERPs due to blog links, but I must admit that I have not investigated this carefully. (Frankly I don't care :) )

GoogleGuy has explicitly stated that links in blog COMMENTS have little value.

[djgreg]

Hm, that surprisingly to me.
There is one site in my area which uses this technique. Google is showing 47 backlinks and they are on #5. All links come from comments on several sites, which seem to disregarded by their owners, so spammers can do whatever they want.
Stupidly these sites have high PR.

greg

[danec]

All of my sites are weblogs. They even say so in their titles, ala 'Widget Blog'.

Google loves them.

[Gory]

All of my sites are weblogs. They even say so in their titles, ala 'Widget Blog'.
Google loves them.

Weblog pages are fine, but backlinks from weblogs comments pages will not contribute to your site rankings. Blog spaming does not work.

[stripey]

any evidence for this?

[Gory]

any evidence for this?

I think it came from GoogleGuy, plus I see it in the rankings.

[billygg]

that is definitely interesting, i have a couple links as well from a couple posts, and it seems to record as a backlink + give a lil bit of PR.

[HughMungus]

Weblog pages are fine, but backlinks from weblogs comments pages will not contribute to your site rankings. Blog spaming does not work.

And how does Google know which sites are blogs, which pages and links are in comments, etc?

[rogerd]

And how does Google know which sites are blogs, which pages and links are in comments, etc?

A third of Google's PhDs are working on this important project right now! ;) Seriously, do you think it would be difficult for Google to identify most blogs? Many of them have distinctive software footprints. Others may be part of blog link networks. If blog spammers can find them, I'm sure Google can.

Google has never balked at a quick fix, even if it's imperfect. Zeus directories named "themeindex" got nuked, while those with other names didn't. I haven't looked at the code lately, but it wouldn't surprise me that MT, for example, has a div named "comments" or similar that would make it easy to analyze where a link occurred.

[rustybrick]

I run a blog, and people try to spam it every day with links. I doubt they try to spam it if it turns out Google won't count those links anyway.

I think Google knows that blog admins do not want spam in their blog comments. So Google leaves it up to us, the admin, to make sure the blogs are spam free.

How do we do that? Well its a bit off topic, so read this blog entry on how I combat movable type blog spam at the Search Engine Roundtable. This has really worked wonders for me and saved me so much time. [seroundtable.com...]

[notredamekid]

Hmm... People often will say a statement is fact on this forum when the statement comes from a reliable source, or is generally agreed upon as true...

for instance, "GoogleGuy says blog comment links do not work" or "GoogleGuy says Guestbook links are not counted"...

Think about it. How would Google block these links? With an algorithm. How would the algorithm know it is a guestbook or blog? Well, it could scan for keywords in the title like "Guestbook" or "Blog" and not count these links I suppose. Or it could search in the code for signatures from well known programs (i.e., not count links from comments on sites using the typepad system) Or it could not count links from certain file names, i.e. "guestbook.htm" or "weblog.html".

But, many guestbooks or FFAs will be called anything else, i.e., tile="Add yourself to my visitor log" with the url="visitors.html". Furthermore, there are very many guestbook and blog scripts, does google know about ALL of them? And what about those that are written for that individual site?

For my part, I have seen sites rank PR5 from guestbooks and FFAs alone- for the last six months.

I would not be so quick to say Google does not count these links.

[oilman]

they are devalued for sure but that's why we go get thousands...

[BigDave]

Here is the exact quote, which does not say that links from blogs or blog comments no longer count, though that is a possible meaning. The suggestion is that they are now doing things to detect and deal with blog comment spamming.

madone, you say in your initial message that you went around signing a lot of blogs, and now your site isn't doing as well as before. It could be one of two things: over the last few weeks, Google has started deploying better technology that negates the effect of blog comment spamming. The changes haven't fully rolled out yet, but it could be that your site just isn't doing as well now that the blog comments aren't doing your site any benefit anymore. The other possibility is that if you did enough blog comments to show up in the blacklist mentioned earlier, or if someone filed a spam report about your site, Google could have investigated, verified that the comments were done by the site in question (you admit this in your first post) and taken manual action to correct the spam.

I personally suspect that they went for a somewhat more elegant solution than just discounting all blog comments, and instead tryed to identify actual blog comment spam instead. But I have nothing to back this up.

[eclipse]

About one month ago i had made a test. I put 100 links to blogs with "difikult to saj" anchor text. Blogs got spidered by google. When i search google for "inanchor:difikult to saj" no results are returned.

So i gues google can identify blogs (i'n my opinion its easy to spot a blog spam).

[sweethilit]

what about links in message boards or phorums?
does he ignore them also?

[eclipse]

Google counts as backlinks links in Polish Language GuestBooks and forums.

[conor]

Blog spam links DO work, as Oilman says though need thousands to see results as they are devalued to an extent.

[stevenb 1959]

If a link is on topic then it has value! It doesnot matter where it comes from as long as it is done properly.

[pontifex]

Hi folks,

IMHO are you talking about undefined things... Google has some, what I call "blacklisted referer words" like guestbook, referer, archive, memberlist.php, comments etc.

if these words are part of the URL, but not the domain, the links are NOT counted:

www.guestbook-whatever.tld/mygb.php does count, but
www.guestbook-whatever.tld/guestbook.php does not.

OK?
P!

[Teknorat]

I don't know what is true and what is not but here's what happened with me. A friend and I decided to do a "google bomb" with the anchor text world's biggest widget (not really.) We researched it heavily and found that as it has been said that google discounts blog links in guest books that this might not be the best way... Sooo instead we only posted in 'blogs' that didn't relly call themselves blogs or use standard blog sites. We also posted in guest books that had no title (I.E. 'My Guest Book' wasn't there) Less than 2 weeks later the site is at the top of the results. So my guess would be that Google discounts them but can only really guess as to whether something is a blog comment etc.. or not.

[muesli]

rustybrick, congratulations - you managed to promote your blog without getting deleted. ;-)

[marttali]

Okay fine it's not sure if google counts them or not, but what about other engines? They probably count them or not?
Not that i'm going to do it

[rustybrick]

muesli,

Its not about promoting my blog, its about helping others.

I promote WebmasterWorld almost daily at the blog.

I posted a URL that was on topic and I am sure it was not deleted for a good reason. They can always delete URLs, but that i the mods decision. Sorry if i caused any trouble, I assume a PM would have been more appropriate here.

[jayq]

It would make sense to devalue blog links as the potential for abuse is high and the authority of them is shakey, at best.

[Teknorat]

It may make sense to devalue them but excluding them altogether will never be an option- Blog spamming is not gonna go away overnight.