subject: How Does The No-follow Rule Affect Link Building Efforts Via Leaving Comments On Blogs? [print this page] Link building is a mission that is important to many web masters, and one
that has grown in priority in recent years. In the first few years of the
Internet, gathering links and building a link network were routine
obligations: a web master was slapped with the duty to build his or her
network by linking to sites that he or she liked. Today, with the great
number of sites on the Internet, and with increasing difficulty in monitoring
the content of websites, the Internets mainstays the search engines
employ digital programs called spiders and robots to scour the Internet for
links. If a website is found to have too many links, it can be considered to
be a link farm, and can be penalized for being so.
There are many exceptions to the rule, however. Some large sites can be so
popular, that they have a large links pages devoted to displaying the links
of their members, suppliers, or buyers. Other pages can be primarily forum
hosts, and as there are many forum members, so are there as many links. Still,
other websites are hosted by a blogging program, where avid blog readers can
leave comments as well as their own links, not only to show their
appreciation for the bloggers efforts, but to increase their own popularity
online as well.
Not all comments on a blog, however, are beneficial. Some spam programs leave
their footprints in blogs by posting a randomly selected set of keywords, and
then leaving the link of a dubious site on the comments page. Because search
engine spiders and robots track even the comments pages of blogs, they can
pick up these keywords, and assign these keywords to the blog, whether or not
they are related to the blogs overall content. And because search engine
spiders and robots pick up the links in the comments pages, they can
unknowingly increase the popularity of these dubious sites and thus promote
the activity of the spam programs that posted them.
Spam programs, therefore, not only overload a blog site and its comments
pages, they can affect the popularity of the site itself. They can also force
search engines to penalize innocent blog sites for housing such dubious links.
In order to avoid this inconvenience, many bloggers and web site designers
employ the no-follow rule. That is, they incorporate codes into their
websites that can do one or more of the following. These codes can hinder
search engine spiders and robots from following certain links. These codes
can also keep anyone from using the comments pages as avenues for increasing
popularity, so that no one, whether spam program or not, can post their links
on the website.
This is well and good for web masters who do not want to be penalized for
things they have little or no control over. This move can also keep a site
from being overloaded by the work of spam programs. However, the no-follow
rule can also adversely affect the link building efforts of smaller, less
popular web masters who are seeking to be noticed on an already popular site.
After all, not all blog comments are designed to only seek popularity for the
person who made the comment. Is there a win-win solution available for people
standing on opposite sides of the popularity divide?
First, not all sites employ the no-follow rule, as it can hinder them from
receiving all important comments it can also keep the same sites from being
visited, which no web master wants. If you are especially keen on increasing
your popularity through posts and comments on blogs, then you can look for
blogs that allow you to post your link, and do not employ the no-follow rule.
Do a good turn as well: allow people to comment on your blog and post their
links.
Second, if you want your site to be more popular, then leave comments that
are useful for the author of the blog site. The more useful the comments are,
and the more insightful you are, the less popularity-hungry you will appear.
Not only will the blogs author appreciate your comments, the fellow comment-
writers will visit your blog and site to see what else you have to say. You
will have increased your popularity without having to storm someone elses
blog with useless comments.
The key to building links is to make the links on your site look like they
are there for a reason; and to make your link and your presence on another
website look like you are there for a good reason as well. The no-follow rule
is good as it can decrease the frequency of spammers, but it also must be
used wisely so that people who have good things to say can have their own
