1 Stupidly Simple Tip That Will Boost PR and SEO
Most of you will know by now, that links left in the comment sections of a blog do not register as an SEO benefical link (search engines ignore them); that is unless you’ve implemented ‘DoFollow’ on your blog. Implementing DoFollow is a practice which has recently been made popular by Andy Beard (who lists different ways to remove NoFollow), Randa Clay (who designed a custom logo for the ‘I Follow’ gang), and helped by a WordPress plugin.
I for one, am in complete support of removing the NoFollow from blog comments, and I’ve removed it from this blog. It’s great all around. It encourages more comments, a stronger community, and increases the links to your blog.
However, here is one simple tip that I really think will boost your Page Rank and SEO, giving you more ‘authority’ in the search engines.
For most of us, leaving a comment on a another blog is quickened by the fact that your ‘details’ are automatically filled in. Your name, email address, and website address; all you have to do is write the comment, and hit enter.
Now here’s the thing; if the blog you’re commenting on has removed NoFollow, and your comment link now possesses ‘Google Juice’, is it wise to always point to your homepage? According to some SEO experts, we should be deep-linking at every opportunity. With Google continually working on producing more relative results, they know that an article on any given keyword, will generally give the searcher what they’re looking for a lot better than a homepage. For that reason, their algorithms are designed to pull up articles with links pointing directly to the article.
Therefore, wouldn’t it be an idea to replace the link to the homepage in the comments section, to one of your best articles? Of course, you’d change the article you’d point to every few weeks of commenting or so, to spread the weight.
Google aren’t stupid, they know that if a site has lots of deep-links to various pages, it must be a credible, and respected site. In turn, Google reward such a site by ranking it higher in the SERP’s, and granting a higher Page Rank.
Of course, if you really wanted to (in the words of John Chow) be evil, instead of putting in your name as the anchor text, you could change it to the article title, or a keyword. However, I strongly recommend you don’t do that as it’ll probably annoy the blog owner and their readers. In fact, if someone did that on my blog, I’d probably delete the comment altogether.
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85 Responses to “1 Stupidly Simple Tip That Will Boost PR and SEO”
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I do that all the time, and try to persuade others to follow suit when leaving comment.
However by linking through to a Wordpress blog that is using Dofollow, you create a trackback with your choice of anchor text, that automatically links through to highly related content, so everyone wins.
Now for this comment I am actually linking through to one of my earliest posts on my current blog, though there are a lot of imported articles that are older. I was discussing the same things more than 6 months ago, though a lot less people were listening then.
The ebook mentioned is free and so is the bonus ebook, and gives people a good idea about linking structure, though it doesn’t fully apply to the chaotic nature of blogs.
Andy - pheww…glad someone else thinks this is ok. I was thinking this might not go down to well for some people.
Thanks for commenting. I’m off to check out that post now
It is also why I set up the Dofollow community on Bumpzee (yeah another highly relative link adding value to your own post)
It gives you a way to find good content that is relevant, especially if you go exploring the tags.
It would be better when you link through to people to use some good anchor text, for instance you could have worded it:-
Andy Beard who provided a list of ways to remove nofollow, and Randa Clay who designed a custom logo for the I Follow Movement.
That makes your links even more relevant for all parties.
Always think, the better anchor text you give someone, the better anchor text they are going to give in return.
It also sells the link which is also important, because that gives people more traffic, and makes them return the favour at a later date more likely.
[…] has One Stupidly Simple SEO Tip to give […]
Andy - Although I make a point of not using ‘click here’ as an anchor text, I do have a habit of linking through names sometimes. Thanks for the reminder. I’ll go and edit it now
Great tip with the deep link. I’ve done that for a while and found as of this week, some of my deep pages PR is higher than my top one. Weird. Every page links to the top.
I tend to use a keyword as a name. Thanks for the heads up to cease and desist.
Louisville - Glad to hear that it has paid off. Have you noticed any difference in search engine traffic?
Some might disagree, but I just think that replacing your name with a keyword, is just going a little too far, and spoils it for everyone else in the community. It’s nice knowing who made the comment at a glance.
hah, didnt know you had more blogs Armen!
I saw you were looking for linkage, try to join the Feed my Feed Train which is in full effect at the moment.
http://bobmeetsworld.com/feed-my-feed/
Seeya
Bob - I didn’t, this blog is less than 2 days old
Sound idea Armen, and one I will implement as soon as I come up with some decent articles
Seriously, it’s a good idea and everyone should do it. I agree with not using anchor text as your comment name though, that just looks spammy, and I also delete those comments.
[…] iffect.net and although it has only 5 posts in it so far, they are all worth reading, most notably 1 stupidly simple tip that will boost PR & SEO. Titles like that always grab my attention, and the tip is well worth reading, especially as you […]
Chris - I’m glad you give it your support, I really appreciate it.
I’m indebted to you for the linkback too. Thank you soooo much!
Thanks for the tip on deep-linking on DOFOLLOW blogs!
(And for the evil mention of John Chow’s way.)
I just want to see if you’ll delete me…
Paula
You have blown open one of the secrets I have been using for a long time. Oh well, the more the merrier. I am completely for removing the nofollow and I will be looking into this for my blog soon.
No problem Armen, I shall be reading regularly…
That’s sound advice! Leaving comments is important, but how you leave them is essential as well.
Paula - Nah…I wouldn’t delete you. However, I might edit.
Craig - I’m not so sure it’s a ’secret’, but I suppose there aren’t all that many people doing it at the moment.
If you’re running WordPress, grab the plugin to get rid of the NoFollow.
Matt - Thanks! I’m glad you appreciate it, just trying to help.
[…] great tip that Andy points to can be found at 1 Stupidly Simple Tip That Will Boost PR And SEO. This tip is to use deep linking in comments rather than just link to the homepage of your blog. […]
Thanks for the great tip, Armen! I’ve seen this before, but never realized the benefit. Thanks to you and Andy for pointing it out.
Ray - My pleasure. Thanks for the link, I really appreciate it!
I arrived to the Do Follow party a bit late, but did make the needed fix to my Blogger template code a week or so ago.
Now I’ve just got to figure out how to get more commenters period. Seems like our site traffic is slowly but steadily increasing, but very few comments are posted.
Thanks for the “deep link” tip. You’re right - it is a stupidly simple strategy, yet I’ve embarrased that I had never thought to employ it…
very nice idea - I hadn’t thought of that thanks!
..ohh and congrats on the new blog
Great tip, Armen Very insightful. You have a great blog and I look forward to reading more of your articles!
Nate and EW - Thanks! I appreciate the words of encouragement.
Rob - I’ll have an article probably coming next week that may address your problem of few comments
Hey, cool! I’ll be eagerly awaiting that article, Armen!
[…] really to do with the quality of their posts. Maybe you’re good friends; maybe they’ve switched off NoFollow; Maybe they offer regular contests; or maybe they’ve just got a name for themselves, and […]
It’s funny how the majority of commenters here still opted to link to their homepages
I’ve only been using this trick for about 2 weeks, but I’m already seeing the payoff. By replacing the homepage link in the comments section on blogs that I frequent, some of my older posts that never seemed to get the exposure I thought they warranted are being brought back into the light of day!
It’s weird, all these great ideas I see around the blog village are so obvious and simple, I have to kick myself for not thinking of them first.
I am using this technique in this comment, however, I am linking to a post I did about comments so it is partly contextual.
Great blog, have now subscribed.
Wayde - Well observed, but there are quite a few which are deep-linked too.
Rob - Thanks for coming back to share that with us. In fact, you’re using it in a way I didn’t suggest, to link to dusty posts in the archives. Great idea!
Armen, I’m not going to “deep link,” because I doubt your readers would think me “deep.” I’m also not very adept with the “technological” aspects of what I’m doing in the blog world. I have a plug-in called CA credits, that I *thought* gave “Google juice” to my readers. Does it? If not, I need to figure out this “Do-follow.”
Thanks.
Shelly
Shelly - Well, having read a comment you left after this one, I’ve discovered you have used the deep-linking idea
I’ve never come across CA Credits before until you mentioned it, but after checking it out, it appears that it would be giving a genuine link to those who leave a comment on your blog, it just works differently than the DoFollow plugins. This must be the plugin David Airey uses on his blog too, nice one!
Armen,
That’s a really good idea. I’m going to start doing so starting right now, good thing I clicked in through Darren Rowe’s Problogger to get here…
Jeremy - Glad to be a help my friend, and I hope it’s not the last time.
I always sign my comments with “adventures in money making” which is the title of the blog.
If there was something relevant I probably would deep link to it, but I don’t think there is!!!
Is just removing the “No” from “no follow” adequate?
So what if you allow visitors to use a Keyword for their name, but start off their comment with their name?
Where is the official Emily Post of Blog comments located?
I use a firefox plugin to highlight links that are no follow. It is amazing to see how many sites apply it to ALL their links, not just comments.
For example, Livejournal posts are all no follow links.
I had no idea that Livejournal was like that. That is terrible! What’s the point?
[…] Recently, there has been a backlash against the (sometimes) unnecessary ‘NoFollow’ attributed to outbound links. Wanting to reward those who make the effort, lots of webmasters have started to DoFollow the link left by those that leave comments on their blogs, including me. […]
Hi and thanks for the well developed site I stumbled upon just now, by way of Wendy Piersall. I’m completely new to this medium and I can see there’s a bit of a learning curve I’ll have to ride but info like what you present in this post and others on your site are as inspiring as they are helpful…looking forward to more!
I totally agree with you. Linking is one of the cornerstones of blogging! I manage a blog network and I’ve decided to use the “Follow Plugin” to disable the NoFollow attribute.
Tom - I know what it’s like. After three months of blogging, you’ll wonder what you were thinking when you remember some of the things you did when you started out.
Your blog could do with a little tidying around the edges, mainly with how you’ve displayed your advertising.
If you’d like, I could review your site publically, and others could learn from it as well as you? Let me know.
HnC - Good decision. It’s only right in my opinion.
nice reading and overall a nice blog
let me add a comment for the sake of it
Interesting. I had no idea that commenting on a blog could give you “Google Juice”. Thanks for the info.
At the first time I saw your blog, I don’t feel to write a comment. However, There is something I need to tell here. You said that deep-linking will higher our PR.
I am kind of person who don’t look for theory, Have you done that before? What kind of result if you compare with linking to home? is it better?
I already read this for a long time. but I don’t make any comparison study which one is better. link to home or deep-linking.
If there is someone who already have this experience, please share.
- Ruri
[…] Â 1 Stupidly Simple Tip that will Boost PR and SEO […]
Thanks for good advice, will start using it now! I’ll share what results I get.
Matt
Ruri - It’s a fairly well known fact that Google gives more weight and value to deep linking than a mere link to a homepage. It means the article/page is being recommended by an outside influence.
I appreciate your questioning Ruri, but sometimes we have to take peoples word on things, or give it a try ourselves. It would be very difficult for anyone to perform a ‘before and after’ for this, there are many other possible variables that could influence results.
Matt - Yeah, I’d like to hear if you are convinced that it’s had an influence, either negative or positive.
Love this tip! Thanks. And thanks for stopping by my site. (saw the photo) Love yours. am rss’ing you now.
Michelle - Glad you stopped by and found something worth reading. I now hope what I send into your feedreader will be beneficial to you
It certainly makes sense - i’ve been considering doing this for pages that are having problems in supplementals but it seems quite labour intensive - can anyone think of any shortcuts?
Jonny - Do the pages have any duplicates?
[…] So a link directly to a relevant article will get more love than a generic link to your homepage. A strategy to take advantage of this knowledge is to leave comments on blogs using as the address of your […]
Thanks very much for this tip. I used to leave links to a relevant article on my site, but then stopped and actually started linking to my homepage instead - I thought this would be better for page rank of my site. But what you say makes sense, I’ll follow your advice in future (in cases where I have a relevant post).
I’ve been using doFollow for a long time now. About a year. It’s pretty nifty and it definately helps with getting noticed and ranked.
A great idea - sounds like something that will really help the community. I’m off to implement it now
Interesting idea - but I prefer comments left to link to a base of a blog - unless the post is specific to the same topic. But thats just me…
Its a nice concept, but it also leads to increased ’spam’ with comments like ‘Good Job’ or ‘Nice blog’ that are not actually relevant to the post, but are just there because the poster saw a ‘DoFollow’ badge on the blog and wanted a backlink.
I suppose you could call this a double edged sword, it’d definitely get your more comments, but also increase your moderation work.
I’m curious, isn’t link juice mostly valuable if the link comes from a site that is related to yours? Isn’t the main value of commenting everywhere about getting humans curious about your site from your insightful comment then checking out your site? In that case the follow/dofollow thing doesn’t really matter. You’ll get a link to your site but not any pagerank juice, I would assume, even with dofollow unless the blog has content related to your website.
Am I missing something?
I hope you messed up your css file or something and this isn’t the theme of the site. Backlinks are key because they help your pagerank. More pagerank = higher odds a user will find your site with a google search = more hits.. some simple math for ya
Thanks for the tip! I am pretty new to this SEO thing, but I am reading and searching around to learn all of those nice tricks!
Great idea. Thanks for the tip to use deep linking to an internal web page.
Just what inspired me to comment on this post ^^
Great article.
Great idea. I usually sign my comments as above and usually people don’t mind.
Tom (TRCoach)
Pretty good article. I like it, keep it up.
Some good advice for sure, but beware blog owners, I have seen many sites with the
dofollow and the comments box being abused by spammers, now I know there are ways to prevent spam, but I have seen many sites spammed from nasty adult websites, and unless the comments are checked by a human they tend to get hang around on the site waiting for confirmation from the site owner, but left live
I think that was a pretty good post. I couldn’t do it
. Keep up the good work.
I think a lot of these sites will be abused by spammers.
hmmm… I like a blog post that makes me think.
wow those seem like smart ideas, not stupid…
thanks so much for the advice… so much to learn!
Now that I’ve learned the term, I’m giving you a “deep link”
haha!!
Nice write-up, I’m also pleased that you wrote there that using article titles as anchor texts, as useful as it may seem will only get the comments deleted faster.
Very interesting I had no idea! Not that stupid is it?
Thanks so much!
Very true with out the do follow tag, the search engines won’t follow the backlink, this means no SEO value and will stop many spammers leaving useless text.
Bloggers beware, unless you are able to monitor your blogs constantly it wont be long before you get every spammer and his dog visiting you site to add worthless feedback in order to get a backlink I have seen this many times, spammers pushing their Viagra other products. This can make the blog virtually worthless to anyone wanting to give some useful and interesting feedback
Very commendable, and you’re right it does encourage more comments. The spam threats are huge and as long as you’re moderating the blog then everyone benefits.
I’ve noticed a recent update that seems to be discounting the value of article backlinks quite considerably.
I suppose video is the answer after all then!
The problem is that you have to wait a while until Google indexes the page rank and that happens once in three months if i am not mistaken.
My question is: Why does blog software by default use nofollow? Is is just to prevent others from gaining a high PR or in other words using blogs to do so?
Thanks for the thumbs up on nofollow tags. I’m new to that.
hehe, I was in the process of starting off a comment rampage across the blogosphere when I read this post!!
I will shortly write a tutorial on how to do it best soon!!!
I think comments are for most part ignored by most bloggers totally and sadly.
Quite a bit of time has passed since your decision.
Interesting how much the nofollow craze changed things for the SEO crowd…this is probably one of the few blogs left that hasn’t succumbed.
==
Lower my bills
Ah comment spam! Spammers ruin the goods for everyone. I get very few spammers on my blog, or commentors for that fact, so moderating the spam isn’t a problem for me. In anticipation of the huge burst of comment spam I use a couple plugins: Link Lov by Andrew Timberlake and No Follow Case by Case Oliver Bockelmann. They have some problems but the ease of use is good for me.
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It sounds simple but not many people know how to remove the nofollow options.
Great tip, something I’ve been doing. You just have to be careful, because blog owners can be pissy and might consider your comment spam.
gotta start somewhere, right? Pressure Washing
i have to practice this, sorry guys
Pressure Washing