Getting Links through Comments on Blogs

Do blog comment links help you in the search engines and Technorati?

[sahil123]

when i post any comment on blogs, for instance if i post some comment on a wordpress blog. Then do search engines recognise the website link given by the commenter on the blog? And do these links also counted by technorati and other such services?

[ezagent]

Blog comments are like guestbook entries, expect the links to be filtered by search engines, making the effort a waste of time.

<snip>

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:08 pm (utc) on Oct. 12, 2006]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com]. [/edit]

[mister charlie]

Blog comments are like guestbook entries, expect the links to be filtered by search engines, making the effort a waste of time.

I would beg to differ with that generalization. First of all, many bloggers have begun to shun the "nofollow" tag. For whatever their reasoning, more and more bloggers are letting commenters receive the juice for taking the time to participate in the conversation.

Secondly, Google is not the only search engine. While the backlinks may, or may not, be recognized by Google, they most surely are recognized by Yahoo. A backlink check in Yahoo on my personal blog list hundreds of links from comments I have made on other blogs.

Finally, and most importantly, you can use commenting on other's blogs as a source of traffic in itself. Forget about the link juice you may or may not receive from the comment. If you post an insightful comment, the other readers of the blog will surely click your link to see what else you have to say. My top referrers on a daily basis are from other blogs that I have commented on. The reason you want the link juice is to help you improve your ranking, which theoretically will improve your traffic. Commenting can bring you the traffic - without waiting to see how you sit in the SERPs.

For the above reasons, I would say that commenting on blogs is hardly "a waste of time".

[JeremyL]

Blog spam is out. What I see Google's algo being able to do is recognize patterns of comment spam. I do not see them discounting individual on topic comment links.

So if you are a dog walker posting comments that are real on a dog blog, then I believe the link will count. And as pointed out, you will get direct traffic from the links. Maybe some of that traffic will like your site and link from their site.

Blogging is all about sharing and community and links of all types are what blogging is built around. Give and you shall receive.

[DXL]

I started a topic about this in the past. I don't know how Google views blog backlinks. I don't know that anyone here can say with any certainty that Google devalues or doesn't count links from blogs unless they happen to be one of their engineers. But I do know that they count for something on Yahoo, particularly if its a related subject. I've seen guys rank well on Yahoo and Google both, going on nothing but backlinks from comments on completely unrelated blogs. I've seen some minor improvements on my own sites in Yahoo from blog backlinks, but that's when I post to sites with related content.

I'm pretty sure its not a waste of time for Yahoo results, and I don't know that anyone can say concretely that its a waste of time for Google.

[ichthyous]

If you use firefox and install the search status plugin you will see that most blog comment links have nofollow tags embedded in them these days

[pele]

I wonder if they treat the content of the blog different than the comments to the content. I've recently noticed many bloggers adding my site to their fave links on the side.