Question OF The Day: Will I get ‘Link Juice’ When I Comment On Other Sites?

By frerecks • April 20th, 2009

For starters, backlinks or inbound links are links pointing to you from other sites. Generally, they are highly weighted signals for search engines like Google. These signals are used to compare your page with others containing the same topic keyword or phrase.

And by the way, back links are losing weight quickly for new signals.

The question relates to a common practice [Image NOT suggestive, example only] where *at times* folks comment with an ulterior motive. Rather than add to the value of a conversation, *at times* the motivation to link stems from an interest in [self generated] backlinks. Unfortunately, most of that effort is a waste of time. And don’t feel bad, no one is completely innocent;-)

This kind of scenario abused links all over the web to a degree that Google felt compelled to create the “no follow” link standard  [attribute rel="nofollow" on hyperlinks] to try and clean it up. The “no follow” link standard enables a site or community owner to allow comment links, but simultaneously eliminate any search engine optimization benefit by making the links invisible to spiders. When used, a “no follow”link attribute or tag is automatically added to a [blog or forum] comment. This is not to say all blogs, social communities, networks and forums use the standard, but compliance has been widely accepted. In fact, many software providers including WordPress, Six Apart and Blogger have complied. Search Engines, including MSN, Yahoo & Ask, are also cooperating and even social networks like Active Rain have hidden comments from crawling.

So the answer to the question, “Will I get ‘Link Juice’ when I comment on other sites?”, is “It depends on whether or not the site owner has enabled the “no follow” link standard.” Considering that it may be hard to determine, the best practice is to drop ulterior motives and comment to add value. If so, you may just benefit from something much more powerful – like PEOPLE! People who may take favorable action like, for instance, recommending you to friends or backlinking to you from their own blogs… because they appreciate the value you add!

Contributed by
chris@kineticknowledge.com


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