SANTA MONICA – To allow blog comments, or not to allow blog comments… that is the question for many bloggers, this one included. While a blog is a great place to send ideas out into the world, the subject of exactly what we expect to get back from it is one that is constantly being discussed, especially when it comes to moderating blog comments. So, the question is this: do blog comments have SEO value?

I am not the first person to investigate this issue. The picture above, ”Paper Blogs”, by Bookwyrmish, was featured in a recent post on the same subject, by Alexander B. Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media. Howard cited two different experts arguing two sides of the issue. One argued that it was a waste of time, while the other said that he enjoyed interacting with customers, but Howard took the time to emphasize his own valid opinion that a blog should be a chance to build a community, not just to preach, which is why comments are so important.

“From where I sit tonight, whether you choose to have comments or not speaks to whether you want to create an online community,” Howard says. “which requires a human’s touch to manage and moderate, or to simply publish your thoughts publicly online, without making the necessary commitment of time and patience.”

Ali Husayni, the CEO of the SEO service company, Master Google, agrees with the need for a quality blog with equally as useful comments. Without an interactive base, readers have no reason to read and comment on your posts, and that will leave you link-less, without the SEO opportunities that every business needs.

“You cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours,” Husayni says. “That simply won’t happen. In a world where there are thousands of new sites built everyday, your prospective site visitors have no way of finding you to read your content [without search engine optimization].”

As for just how often to moderate your comments and how many posts you need to put up per week, consider these things to be a part of your overall marketing efforts. Stay white hat with these for optimal SEO. What exactly is white hat marketing? It includes quality content, site optimization, guest blogging, internal linking, and more. In our recent post, we defined white hat marketing and compared it to other practices. Check it out: Best SEO Practices: Black Hat vs. White Hat Techniques and the Gray Hat Area.

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One of our clients brought up an issue with me a few days ago. While trying to visit relevant blogs to his site and placing a comment there with a link back to his site, he noticed that almost 100% of these sites have a “nofollow” tag.

- Is it worth to place a comment/link where the link will have a nofollow tag?
- Are there blogs that do not have a no-follow tag for the comment sections? How can we find them?
- If leaving comments on blogs has no link-value, then why should we do it?

What is a nofollow tag?

A nofollow tag has the following format (HTML code):

<a href=”http://www.website.com” rel=”nofollow”>text link</a>

The nofollow tag indicates to Google (and other) spiders to not follow the link to its intended place. Thus, making such links value-less from an SEO point of view. The only intended audience for these links are human visitors who cannot tell the difference between a followed link and a nofollowed link (because the code is hidden in the back-end).

Now, getting back to the original questions. The short answer is that if you leave comments to get some link-juice for your site, don’t do it. You won’t get any SEO benefit from them. Because many black-hat SEO companies have abused the comment section of the blogs, almost all blogs have nofollow tags for the comment sections.

On the other hand, they don’t have nofollow tags for the main blog pages or other links on the site.

Instead of leaving a comment with your link in it, contact the blog admin and tell him that you’re interested in placing a link to your site on his blog/site.

Here are some tips to get the most benefit from your efforts:

- Check the blog’s PR (Page Rank). Sites with less than PR3 are usually not worth your efforts.
- In your first contact, indicate that you’re willing to pay a fee if necessary. Most blog owners crave for such business generating from their blog and most are honest people that will honor your agreement.
- Ask for a link on the home page. Home page links have far more value than links from the internal pages.
- Try to make an arrangement for a year at a time – the longer your link stays on a site, the more value it will have with Google.
- Pay monthly if you can.
- Give the blog admin the exact URL and anchored text-link to be used for the link.
- Also give him a description to go with/around your text link – a text-link without any text around it could be viewed negatively by Google.
- Varry your anchored-text as well as the URL for the best results.
- Monitor your link on a regular basis.

Still, visit blogs and leave comments with links to your site, not for the benefits of SEO, but for encouraging other blog visitors to visit your site. That generates traffic/customers and if you have excellent content, could lead to natural links for your site.

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