Value of Newspaper Comment Links

[TriviaChicken]

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?

[KeriMorgret]

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]

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.)

[EGOL]

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".

[Thos003]

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.

[TriviaChicken]

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..."

[AlanBleiweiss]

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.

[AlanBleiweiss]

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.

[EGOL]

Alan, I should post your comment on my blog to discourage the link spammers.  lol

Thumbs up!

[AlanBleiweiss]

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. 

[phogan]

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.

[Thos003]

Thanks Alan. And yes, staying relevant is always a quality factor.

[EGOL]

You are welcome!