More Bad News for Blog commenting. Say Goodbye II

[Mike Anthony]

Whatever you think about Blog commenting Google is clearly out to destroy it as a way of getting backlinks. In February's videos Google released this

YouTube - Can having dofollow comments on my blog...

Three interesting points from this video


1) Indicating what some have been saying for a long time. Dofollow blogs actually degrades a pages reputation in the eyes of Google. So getting a link from them is not the same as getting a link from a high PR page that doesn't allow wide open commenting.

2) its senseless arguing about the term Dofollow. some people get bent out of shape about using the term yada yada yada. All it means is that if a search engine encounters it it will follow it. Either way when Google uses the term themselves then its evidence of how mainline the term is in SEO.

3) Getting dofollow links back to your site won't hurt you but given that Google warned bloggers in November 2009 and are back again in February 2010 expect alot more sites to go nofollow. Really it now makes no sense for ANY reputable sites to allow unmoderated dofollow commenting because it does nothing for them and now they will begin to realize that it actually hurts their site.

The take away for people building links?

If your goals are short term and you spend a lot of time doing blog commenting just be prepared for those links to disappear. Its not a good long term strategy. Theres no reason for the web masters to leave them there now with Google actively telling site owners theya re degrading their sites reputation because of it.

For people who own blogs that they want to rank?

Obvious. moderate your comments or make them all nofollow. Most will end up making them nofollow since with the commenting bots around you can get hundreds of nonsense posts to moderate every week or month.

I know of course some people won't like this post but those be the facts.

[Davioli]

looking at this from a grand scheme of things.. Google is trying to devalue sources of backlinks that don't "seem natural"

Even though I've never gone on the profile link bandwagon.. I don't see how they will survive for long. They are as un-natural as blog comments and I'm sure google will figure out a way to single them out and penalize them(or as they are going to do for blog comments.. they might penalize the websites allowing dofollow profile links)

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Davioli

l
Even though I've never gone on the profile link bandwagon.. I don't see how they will survive for long. They are as un-natural as blog comments and I'm sure google will figure out a way to single them out and penalize them

You have a point if you are focusing in only on Forum profile links. However there are a ton load of sites that allow their users to do a lot more than just post a link. They allow their users to post blogs, articles and long about me sections that are similar to blog posts. These sites are not built on one dominant software platform like Vbulletin.

I can't ever see google creatng an algorithm that punishes blogs and articles. As a programmer I can tell you it would be almost impossible to identify these kinds of in context backlinks when they don't even have standard footprints for you to identify.

So mix up that profile link building portfolio and you will be fine.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by ChaibiAlaa

You mean that each blogger have to make his links Nofollow ?

Hi ChaibiAlaa,

No, bloggers do not "have to make his links Nofollow", but they should definitely moderate their comments and delete all spam comments.

@Mike,

There doesn't seem to be anything new here. Google has held the webmaster responsible for all outgoing links on his website for many years. This is just a restatement of their long standing policies regarding outbound links.

What seems to be the positive, yet unspoken conclusion you could draw from this is that do follow blogs, that have heavy moderation of comments, can be valuable as backlinks. These types of blogs only allow highly useful comments to be published and those few comments that do pass the grade will be quite useful in a backlink campaign. I especially like those that close comments after a short period of time.

While nofollow comments can be quite useful for traffic when done properly, they will be worth little on a blog that doesn't heavily moderate comments. The bottom line seems to be links from quality blogs are worth more and wide open blogs, do follow or nofollow, aren't worth much if anything at all.

Spammers seem to be constantly searching for those wide open sites to post their spam and Google is also looking for them to devalue those links. That's why you must constantly and continuously build backlinks if you choose the path of the spammer, and you don't if you choose the path of high quality backlinks.

If you build your backlinks on a foundation of sand (spam) they don't last and you have to constantly rebuild. When you build your backlinks on solid rock (high quality) they last and last.

[AFD]

I stopped commenting on blogs for a while so this news does not concerns me at all... People who are doing blog commenting services are the ones who will be affected...

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by dburk

@Mike,

There doesn't seem to be anything new here. Google has held the webmaster responsible for all outgoing links on his website for many years. This is just a restatement of their long standing policies regarding outbound links.

@Dburk

Its really immaterial if the policy is old. Many of us knew this before but what IS new here is that within about a 90 day period Google has released warnings about comment spam. Any time Google says these things it has a new effect. When Google posts these things more people who never knew before catch on to the policy. Its new to them which is all that matters and if the site that you have been commenting on now becomes nofollow because the site owner gets the message then its new to you to - you no longer have the backlinks you had..

Its kind of like when CNN reports that say something like orange juice is good for you in a new report. It reminds people. Its in their minds and people who even knew better before decide to actually start drinking it. The more Google releases this stuff the more people wake up and the more backlinks that will disappear.

[Kay King]

t's old policy - but may be newly enforced again.

What is funny is for google to introduce Sidewiki and then complain about comment spam....

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kay King

What is funny is for google to introduce Sidewiki and then complain about comment spam....

too true but it joins a whole list of hilarious complaints

User experience with buying links but placing adsense on sites all over the Internet.

Wanting the user to get the best results in search with no confusion but placing ad results to appear at the top of the search results.

claiming writing good content is the way to rank high but then admitting if you don't have enough backlinks Google wont crawl much of your content.

Its quite a list.

[Daniel McGonagle]

Blog commenting has always been low-level link building whose only main long term impact is direct traffic.

Think about it....if you were first commenter you'd get more potential direct traffic than the 50th commenter

...but the 50th comments gets as much link juice out of their comments as the first commenter, as subsequent comments with links embedded bleed the link juice of the url by increasing the number of OBLs on the page.

So, un-moderated comment-able URLs will get smashed hard

Sad thing is...people still look at PageRank of a blog or url as a pre requisite for commenting somewhere because they think that's P Ranked urls will give them link juice when it's not always the case

[bgmacaw]

Most of this is scare tactics on Google's part. They want and need webmasters to moderate links because they can't do it with much accuracy within the algorithm. Human manipulation of search results is causing them to run into legal hot water in the EU and perhaps soon in the US as well. So they need webmasters to run scared and moderate links or remove them.

That said, you should tightly moderate links on your sites to insure that only reasonable sites are linked to and not bad neighborhood sites. Likewise, it's not a good idea to use mass blog commenting tools as a long term strategy to grow a site. Strategic blog commenting though will still work for quite some time I suspect both from the perspective of the webmaster and commentator.

[Daniel McGonagle]

What are are you thoughts on using Disqus to offsource your comments to another page so there's no bleeding of link juice?


Does anyone have any data on whether or not making dedicated, seperate comment pages adds more indexed urls to your site without depleting url being commented on?

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

Most of this is scare tactics on Google's part. They want and need webmasters to moderate links because they can't do it with much accuracy within the algorithm. Human manipulation of search results is causing them to run into legal hot water in the EU and perhaps soon in the US as well. So they need webmasters to run scared and moderate links or remove them.

That said, you should tightly moderate links on your sites to insure that only reasonable sites are linked to and not bad neighborhood sites. Likewise, it's not a good idea to use mass blog commenting tools as a long term strategy to grow a site. Strategic blog commenting though will still work for quite some time I suspect both from the perspective of the webmaster and commentator.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

Most of this is scare tactics on Google's part. They want and need webmasters to moderate links because they can't do it with much accuracy within the algorithm.

Agree with much of that and what you write but I'll disagee with that slightly. Most of the blogs these days are running on one platform - Wordpress. Its easy to see how wordpress formats the standard comment list. Independent developers change that up some but it wouldn't take that much for the algorithm to identify the standard footprints and skip links within that footprint. When and if that is coming I have no idea.

Likewise, it's not a good idea to use mass blog commenting tools as a long term strategy to grow a site. Strategic blog commenting though will still work for quite some time I suspect both from the perspective of the webmaster and commentator.

Agreed. Moderated blogs are the only thing that makes sense and using automated tools for that is the kiss of death to getting the webmaster to approve the comment.

[azeemi]

Sad thing is...people still look at PageRank of a blog or url as a pre requisite for commenting somewhere because they think that's P Ranked urls will give them link juice when it's not always the case

[/QUOTE]

What does it mean? Is this because the more links will be on Web page, the less link juice will be divided. And it will be consider as a link farming.

Am i right? I look forward to hearing from you.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

too true but it joins a whole list of hilarious complaints

User experience with buying links but placing adsense on sites all over the Internet.

Wanting the user to get the best results in search with no confusion but placing ad results to appear at the top of the search results.

claiming writing good content is the way to rank high but then admitting if you don't have enough backlinks Google wont crawl much of your content.

Its quite a list.

Hi Mike,

I agree there is a widespread perception that Google's own actions aren't consistent with their policies for webmaster. I personally do not see it that way.

I recall listening to a Google engineer, speaking at a developers conference a few years ago, describe how they formulate and publish their policies. What struck me as interesting is that he said they have a team of linguist that analyze every word and confirm the words accurately convey their policies as practiced. While they do not disclose all of their policies and procedures they are careful to only say what is accurate and in a very concise fashion. I took that to mean that you do not need to read into their words anything that isn't actually said.

For example, many people erroneously believe that Google has said that you cannot or should not buy or sell links to or from your website. That is pure hogwash, they have never said that. What they actually said is that you shouldn' buy or sell links for the purpose of pagerank manipulation. They also say that you should make your paid for links labeled as such and that you shouldn't allow them to pass PageRank. Google's own practice is absolutely consistent with this policy.

I read your earlier thread about Google ignoring your content without backlinks. What Matt Cutts actually said is that if you have a very large website that you may need to do some deep linking or they may not index all of your content. They have a practical and technical reason that this is true. The Googlebot is programed to only crawl a few levels deep in your hierarchy of links. If you have a tremendous amount of content your hierarchy will exceed the programming limitations placed on the bot. To ensure that all of your content is crawled you should place some deep links when you have a large amount of content or pages that are buried many levels deep within your link structure.

Early in Google's development they encountered a serious problem. You see some clever programmers figured out how to dynamically create unique content on the fly from a large database that effective became an infinite loop that trapped the bots within their websites. To counter this all bots had to be programmed to limit the depth of a crawl. Since it's virtually impossible for the bots to distinguish a very large website from an infinite loop website you must build deep links to ensure that all of your content will eventually get indexed. A website with a few hundred pages of content and good link structure generally does not need to be concerned about this.

[JRoon]

Just delete spammy comments in your blog and you should be fine.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by dburk

For example, many people erroneously believe that Google has said that you cannot or should not buy or sell links to or from your website. That is pure hogwash, they have never said that. What they actually said is that you shouldn' buy or sell links for the purpose of pagerank manipulation. They also say that you should make your paid for links labeled as such and that you shouldn't allow them to pass PageRank. Google's own practice is absolutely consistent with this policy.

Dburk think it through. Of course Google does not sell links for pagerank manipulation. They own the engine. Why do people buy links for pagerank Sir? to get high placement in the results. Google just puts the paid link right at the top of a search result. LOL. Erroneously believe my eye. If they don't want paid links to affect the serch result and they were consistent they wouldn't put two or three ads at the very top of the results. They can label it sponsored but you pay a premium price to be ranked there in most cases precisely because its placed where it is at the top of the search results. People click on it there alot ignoring the sponsored link notice (in fact not even seeing it). The affect is the same. YOu are buying placement.

I'm equally aware of what I posted in that thread. Facts are you need links to get pages crawled. I have obviously no problem with that. I derive a good bit of business based on that. But lets not kid ourselves. Google does represent that content is what you really need (I'm not going to even entertain an argument on that as i've seen Cutts say it a number of times) to get backlinks and content by itself will not get you backlinks until it is noticed by someone.

If you build it not only will others not automatically see it Google will not come. You HAVE to market it.

So I have no problem with why they do things and why that is. My issue is to not tell people that real world SEO does not require you to do more than just create great content as they suggest pretty often.

Anyway that was just my one response to Kay's last post not the subject of this thread.

[Daniel McGonagle]

Yes, OBLs are a term you should become familiar with when considering your optimal link targets.

Guest author post How-to:

http://sem-group.net/search-engine-o...-link-targets/

Losing Link Juice to Outbound Links- This says draining out link juice via many OBLs is a myth,I disagree


What does it mean? Is this because the more links will be on Web page, the less link juice will be divided. And it will be consider as a link farming.

Am i right? I look forward to hearing from you.[/QUOTE]

[tjcocker]

I'd be willing to bet real money that 90% of everyone that owns a blog has no idea who Matt Cutts is. Present company excluded.

This is just more bluster from google because they can't deal with the problem. Which is, they can't ignore all comments or they'll lose searchers due to non-relevant search results, and they can't deal with it on their own. Result: Hand wringing and finger wagging, but not much else. lol

[HaplinJ]

There will always be dofollow blogs, and it makes sense not to put all of your eggs into one basket, that is for sure. Mix it up often!

Has anyone ever thought that Google might have to change their algorithm again if every webmaster made their links NOFOLLOW? Imagine if all links went nofollow tomorrow...They would have to remove it in my opinion.

[Marhelper]

Is there any reason to even pay attention to "No Follow" vs "Do Follow" anyway? I think too many people get caught up in this argument and I am not sure it even matters.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Marhelper

Is there any reason to even pay attention to "No Follow" vs "Do Follow" anyway? I think too many people get caught up in this argument and I am not sure it even matters.

uh oh. Lets not have that one again - not here.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

Google just puts the paid link right at the top of a search result. LOL. Erroneously believe my eye. If they don't want paid links to affect the serch result and they were consistent they wouldn't put two or three ads at the very top of the results. They can label it sponsored but you pay a premium price to be ranked there in most cases precisely because its placed where it is at the top of the search results. People click on it there alot ignoring the sponsored link notice (in fact not even seeing it). The affect is the same. YOu are buying placement.

Google does not sell the top slots, right above the results. Many searches
you do, there are none there. They pride themselves on not selling these.

However, it is with a wink that google says this. Only paid links will appear
there, as they are chosen from the paid link pool.

It's the way they are chosen that is not paid for. You cannot buy a top
spot like the ones on the right.

So, how do you get there? Google says it use a ranking system of click-thrus
and and nonclick backs, among other things, to qualify for one of these spots.

They think they are doing their searchers a favor, choosing links that have
shown over time to be spot on and top notch for what you are searching for.

So you can't buy the top spot, but if you don't pay, you would never show
up. Google says they don't sell the top spot, technically they are correct,
but with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

Paul

[mikkosant]

Originally Posted by Marhelper

Is there any reason to even pay attention to "No Follow" vs "Do Follow" anyway? I think too many people get caught up in this argument and I am not sure it even matters.

Not again.

Most people agree that dofollow is more important because it is considered an editorial style link of importance. Nofollow still provides value and if you cannot notice any ranking improvements, atleast you're building a diverse link profile.

Get links from places where you would actually suspect people interested in your service or product hang out. From there, your site is atleast ontopic and may get traffic. Rather than another #^$% empty profile page. Yeah they work, but who knows how long and how much of an impact they will provide in the future.

Point - Get dofollow backlinks if you want to improve your serps. Throw in some nofollow links for good measure, bake at 350 for 20 minutes, and BAM!

Front page of google for your desired keyword!

[Liquidgraph]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Google does not sell the top slots, right above the results. Many searches
you do, there are none there. They pride themselves on not selling these.

However, it is with a wink that google says this. Only paid links will appear
there, as they are chosen from the paid link pool.

It's the way they are chosen that is not paid for. You cannot buy a top
spot like the ones on the right.

So, how do you get there? Google says it use a ranking system of click-thrus
and and nonclick backs, among other things, to qualify for one of these spots.

They think they are doing their searchers a favor, choosing links that have
shown over time to be spot on and top notch for what you are searching for.

So you can't buy the top spot, but if you don't pay, you would never show
up. Google says they don't sell the top spot, technically they are correct,
but with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

Paul

Completely WRONG! Those top 3 yellow ads in Google SERPs are no different than the ads you see on the side. #1-3 position in Adwords gets you those 3 yellow spots out in front.

[stateless]

So many blogs are nofollow anyway, and using blog comments to build links isn't typically a priority with link building anyway.. mainly just getting relevant traffic to your site.

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by stateless

So many blogs are nofollow anyway, and using blog comments to build links isn't typically a priority with link building anyway.. mainly just getting relevant traffic to your site.

Very true. Outside of IM crowds blog commenting is NOT considered a good way to get backlinks. SEO experts consider it quite weak.