Value of Newspaper Comment Links
-
Although most newspaper comment sections are a no-follow zone, I have noticed that some comments I have posted with links end up being followed. The comments are participatory and the links relevant and even add to the conversation. My theory is that some comments are monitored and if the editors are looking to encourage discussion and don't feel like your spamming, why not take the no follow off. I do plan on doing some testing with poor, spammy comments on the same papers but am encouraged and would like to know what other people have found.
-
You are welcome!
-
Thanks Alan. And yes, staying relevant is always a quality factor.
-
My theory is that many comment sections start off no-follow as default specifically to avoid spamming but if a human reads it and determines it adds to the conversation, they turn it into a follow. I'm sure Google is able to determine the sites that screen comments from a human.
-
EGOL, I was just thinking today out of all the people who answer questions in Pro Q&A, you're at the top of my "pay attention to" list. So thanks for the compliment.
-
Alan, I should post your comment on my blog to discourage the link spammers. lol
Thumbs up!
-
Thomas that's an important distinction. The quality of the article to target page relationship is critical, and mostly for attracting new visitors regardless of primary SEO value. Even though visitor clicks do add to SEO as well, there's so much more to the process that if comment links are an intentional and significant part of an SEO campaign it's really more likely to be a timesuck.
-
Lets go beyond the excellent input EGOL has provided for a moment.
How relevant are the articles you're dropping links in the comment area of to the site you're linking to? How relevant is the topic to the target topic? How much of your link building energy is focused on this as a link building tactic?
Comment links offer such little value even when all conditions are ideal that it's really not a prudent use of time and resources. At least not from an SEO best practices perspective.
-
Thanks for the perspective - I guess after all is said and done, everything we need to know about tech is summed up "Garbage in, garbage out..."
-
Interesting thought on the follow, nofollow and the editorial approval or disapproval. Would love to hear your follow up.
Regardless of the do follow or no follow and the link value, I have found that traffic value is still a huge bonus. One quality comment on a high traffic article can produce a lot of visitors.
-
Comments are turned off on my blog because of this.
Also, since I link out to lots of sites from my blog (within the posts) I have a heavy rain of email from people who are trying to weasel a "mention".
-
I see it as mainly a webmaster's problem.... once the programmers start sending robots to spam your blog then you will be hit with a lot of comments to clean up.
For the person who uses blog comments as a linkbuilding strategy, I think that google can recognize blog comment links and probably counts them as very very low value links. If the link profile of your site consists almost entirely of blog and forum comments then that might put an unpleasant odor on your site. (I have no proof for this, just sayin' how I would treat the links if I was google and my confidence that they can recognize them if they want to.)
-
I know regular people who have seriously considered shutting down their blog or turning off comments because they got on a "dofollow blog" list and kept getting spammed because of that.
-
EGOL,
Interesting point.
Do you see that as only an issue for the site with the comment section, or also a cascading problem for the folk using this as a means to drum up links?
-
why not take the no follow off?
That will put you on every spammer's "dofollow blog" list. And the bigger problem is when your site gets on the blogspamming program database.
-
Please do post your findings!
What I expect you will find is that each website is set up a little differently - many as a matter of practice drop a 'nofollow' on entire sections of their site. Some don't. Some (take SEOMOZ.org as an example) have a more intricate process that determines whether comment links are nofollow'd or not.
I understand that there are some companies out there that do linkbuilding campaigns by linking from forums that don't seem to have the nofollow dropped on them (not that anyone here would do such a dastardly deed as to buy links...). One that was on their list is Adobe forums -- on my list of things-to-do is to post there and see if some link juice comes out of it.
Another unlikely source of a link that I got one time was from Craigslist.org, when I was bringing an intern onboard. Not exactly my idea of a high-value link, but hey...
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Facet Values as Anchor text
Hi I've reviewing our internal linking structure & have found that the facets/filter buttons on a category, are crawled and have anchor text to each link, for example: The anchor text to filter the product listing results by those under £50 would be: | Facet Value Less than £50.00 (15) Less than £50.00 (15) | This also has the source URL & destination URL of http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lockers I haven't come across this before - is this an issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Site wide links - should they be nofollow or followed links
Hi We have a retail site and a blog that goes along with the site. The blog is very popular and the MD wanted a link from the blog back to the main retail site. However as this is a site wide link on the blog, am I right in thinking this really should be no follow link. The link is at the top of every page. Thanks in advance for any help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
OSE link report showing links to 404 pages on my site
I did a link analysis on this site mormonwiki.com. And many of the pages shown to be linked to were pages like these http://www.mormonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Planning_a_trip_to_Rome_By_using_Movie_theatre_-_Your_five_Fun_Shows2052752 There happens to be thousands of them and these pages actually no longer exist but the links to them obviously still do. I am planning to proceed by disavowing these links to the pages that don't exist. Does anyone see any reason to not do this, or that doing this would be unnecessary? Another issue is that Google is not really crawling this site, in WMT they are reporting to have not crawled a single URL on the site. Does anyone think the above issue would have something to do with this? And/or would you have any insight on how to remedy it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Does linking to a div pass value to the base url?
hi, because of how my site is laid out, in many cases, it makes sense from a user experience standpoint to link to a specific id rather than to the base url (and the top of the page). for internal links on my site, will linking to http://domain.com/page/#div pass the same link value as linking to http://domain.com/page/ ? or am i shooting myself in the foot with this approach? thanks, Moz buddies!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RGS_Energy0 -
Advice on Link Removal Services
Hello everyone, Due to the Penguin update my site unfortunately took a bit of a hit. A little while ago I submitted all of our questionable/bad links to the disavow tool, however I still wante to go back and delete any and all problematic links that are still out there. Ive looked into many services, however I haven't been too impressed. Removeem - The email addresses they provided weren't always valid, and their email tool didn't always deploy correctly - a lot of cross referencing and was not saving me any time. Link Detox - Free trial was a bust. They show you 10 links on the free trial, however for me, 9 of the 10 were all the same. Couldn't get a good feel of their system. Rmoov - Their tool is one where you upload your own links, and they help manage everything, however they DONT allow you to email through their system, so Im not sure how this helps my process if I have to do everthing manaully anyway. A lot of sites I see are also a full service approach that charge you based on how many links they remove, and this can get quite costly. I have also contacted:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lukin
Link Delete - No reponse from multiple email requests
Linkquidator - No response
Infatex - No response My questions to all of you are: Is there any company out there that you recommend that provide a self service tool [online or desktop driven]? Is this even an avenue I should explore, or should I compile my own list [as 3rd party algorithms are not always accurate] and reach out to sites manually? Is disavowing good enough and Im just spinning my wheeles trying to now get them all removed? Thanks!0 -
Footer link - Created by
Hi everyone We created a website for our customer, and we wanted to have a footer link: "Created by WebPerfection.biz" Some Marketing company advised our customer, that it will hurt their SEO if they have that link for us in footer Would you guys advice on this please? Thank you P.S. site for our customer: www.azsedans.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidIRC0 -
Switching to masked affiliate links
Hi there, I run a content affiliate website where I introduce products in articles and then link to merchants where the user can buy the respective product. Currently I am using regular affiliate links here with the "nofollow" attribute. With growing size of the site, I would like to switch to masked affiliate links, so instead of a link like "jdoqocy.com/click-123" I want to use "mydomain.com/recommend/123". My question here is: When switching to masked affiliate links, does it makes sense to also convert all the older unmasked affiliate links? If yes, what would be the best way to do that - Convert all old links at once or convert them over time (e.g. over a few month)? Currently about 2/3 of my site's outbound links are unmasked, external affiliate links. So I am afraid that changing this relatively large share of links from unmasked external affiliate links to masked links doenst look natural at all... Thank you for your advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FabRag0