Do Disqus Links Still Count as Much?

[ProductPearson]

Commenting on blogs is not only fun and allows you to give your insight on a particular topic, but it also allows you to get a backlink to your website from many, many websites. In the old version of Disqus, when you clicked on the username of a user inside the comments, it went directly to the website that username was associated with, and people loved this.

Now however, it opens up in a popup window when you click on the username so you can view a mini profile of that Disqus user, and the URL to the homepage is listed there.

My question is, considering the link is loaded in that window instead of directly from the comments section on the page you commented on, does this have less effect on SEO?

[ThompsonPaul]

Blog commenting hasn't been a useful SEO tool for quite some time, Ashley. Pretty well all blog comment links are no-followed (including even the old Disqus system) so the links pass no ranking value to their target. When overdone, they are a clear spam signal to the search engines and can be one of the types of links Google penalizes with it's Penguin algorithm/filter.

So doing commenting for any SEO purposes is a fool's errand now, unfortunately.

HOWEVER! Doing it for the real, human, connecting-with-other-relevant sites purposes and contributing to the conversation is still quite valuable. Keep doing that part for those reasons. Just don't wast time/energy worry about the SEO component.

Make sense?

Paul

[ProductPearson]

This post is deleted!

[ProductPearson]

I figured as much. Its a shame that it has come down to that. Its amazing how my website still gets about 3000 comments a day, all of which are in a spam queue. People seem to think they are still counting for something.

What would you say is your favourite way for building links now then? (without spilling your secret sauce of course)