SEO Friends

Most of you probably already know that you can boost your search engine rankings by getting back links to your site, but how many of you are using blog comments to get back links?

You have probably heard that you shouldn’t waste your time with blog comments because the search engines don’t follow the link because of the no follow tag.

There is a trace of truth to this but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use blog comments to get back links because there are some blogs that don’t have the no follow tags on their comments.

WordPress by default adds the no follow tags to the comment section but there are people that will remove the no follow tags from your comments in return for you leaving comments. Believe it or not there is a way you can find these blogs with a search.

Before I get into what to look for to find blogs without the no follow tag I want to cover comment etiquette.

Any comment you leave on a blog MUST have something to do with the content of the post.

For example if the post is on blog comments your comment should be related to that post and have something to do with the content of the post. Don’t leave a comment talking about how to conquer the newest MLM offering.

Don’t put links in the body of your comment. This is very bad etiquette unless the link is to a resource that expands on your comment. This doesn’t mean if you have a site on sports fishing you can put a link to your site in the comment body but if the post is on a new way to string a leader you can put a link to a page (on your site or another) that shows how to do this.

Most of the time when I set up a blog I set the comments in the discussion area so that if you put links in the body of the comment it will send your comment to moderation where I have to review and approve or deny the comment before it is posted. This stops all the spammy links.

Now your name or I should say the form field where you enter your name. This should be your name or your moniker. For example I will use Randy The Hermit because more people know me that way than by my normal last name. Your moniker can have keywords in it (only helps if there are not any no follow tags) but it should be related to you or what you do. For example if you teach people how to blog you could use the moniker Blog Boy or Blogging Teacher but your moniker should stay the same no matter what you use for a link.

That pretty much covers the etiquette but I can hear a lot of you out there screaming, “Why should I bother if it is going to have the no follow tag on the back link?”

This question can be given a few answers, such as:

1. People will see your comments and your links even if there is a no follow tag. If you put 4 comments on blogs per day you will end up with over 1,500 links in a year. These links will be seen by potentially tens of thousands of readers that might visit your site.
2. If your comments are on topic and informative people will remember your name and you will become a known expert in the field. This is part of the reason you want to use the same name.
3. If your comment is informative you will also find that a lot of the readers will click on your link to find out more about you.
4. If you are selling advertising on your site through a service like text link ads they sometimes do their own back link research and ignore the no follow tag. This could result in you receiving more income from your ads.

If comments have the no follow tag activated how do you tell?

You can find a post with comments and look at the source code for the page, scroll through all the code until you find the comments and then look for the no follow tag. Yes, this is awkward but it gets the job done.

The good news is that you don’t have to do it that way. If you are using FireFox or Flock as your browser you can get an addon that will highlight all the no follow tags on a page. It is called SEO for FireFox and you can get it from SEOTools.com or you can search SEO for FireFox addon in Google.

Once this is installed all no follow links will be highlighted in red so they are easy to notice. If the link (the name) in the blog comment isn’t highlighted that mean the no follow is shut off for the comments on that blog.

People that run WordPress blogs want you to leave comments and they don’t want spam comments so a lot of them have started using a plugin that rewards the people that comment frequently, this plugin is called Lucia’s Linky Love.

How it works it the owner of the blog can set the plugin so that after so many posts the no follow tag is removed from the comments of that person.

It checks the name and email address to see if this person has ever commented before and keeps track of all the ones that match. If you use different names (which has already been pointed out as a no no) or different emails you will never have the no follow tags removed.

Most commonly this is set at 3 to 5 posts before the no follow tags are removed but the blog master can set if from 3 to a million if they like.

How do you find blogs that use Lucia’s Linky Love plugin? The easiest way is to use Google’s Blogsearch, put your keywords in quotes and then put a plus sign and then Lucia’s Linky in quotes and do you search. It should look something like this “keyword phrase”+”Lucia’s Linky” you results should sow you posts that are related to your keywords and using Lucia’s Linky Love plugin.

On my blogs I usually have this set at three and I review the comments on a regular basis any comments that read like pure spam I delete. Because I delete them the spammers never get to the magic number of three and the no follow stays in place. This leads to more comments that are usually more informative.

Related articles:

• How To Build Link Popularity Immediately
• How To Build Link Popularity Immediately
• How To Quickly Get Free Traffic To Your Website
• Simple Blogging SEO Tips
• 5 Blogging Plugins That All Blogs Should Use
• The Benefits Of Blogs: Monitoring Website Traffic
• SEO Optimization Tool
• A Few Tips For Generating Traffic To Your Site

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