Advantages of comments
- Returns value to future visitors
- Adds content and helps you rank for lateral keywords in search engines.
However, what about comment links? What role do they play in the SEO of your site?
Effects of comments links in SEO of your blog
The moment a reader leaves a comment on your blog, you will give bribe to them in the form of links, right?
If you are clever, you are offering them no-follow links.
No-following the comment links are important.
Unrelated outbound links in your blog certainly hurt SEO, as it may look unnatural.
No-following these links, tells – “Hey, Google please don’t follow this link, it’s no way concerned to my blog. Don’t determine the authority of my blog by scrutinizing these outbound links”.
In some cases, it’s up to the Google to respect your request.
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Role of Comment Links in SEO[/caption]Related links boost SEO and unrelated links hurt SEO a little
The links that commenters leave on your blog, have some SEO benefit to you. If those links are related to the content on your blog, it gives an SEO boost.
How?
Related outbound links help Google in understanding the context of content on your blog accurately.
On the other hand…
If you are having more unrelated links, especially in the comments section, which are unavoidable, no-follow them.
You may not know this: Google has the ability to differentiate between the main blog content and the comments.
So…
Remember this: Unrelated no-follow links within your main blog content hurt more than that of having unrelated no-follow links within your comment section.
If you are using CommentLuv plugin, the recent posts feature may leave many unrelated links on your blog posts. Even though you no-follow those CommentLuv links, it may affect you a little.
I would advise you to moderate the recent posts (luvs) strictly.
Remove the Luv, if…
- The comment is not insightful enough
- The link is completely unrelated. Like health blog link in an SEO blog!
Beware of spam comment links
As I said earlier that, it’s entirely up to the Google to respect your no-follow label. Google most of the times values no-follow links in authoritative sites like Wikipedia, NY Times.
So one can say whether Google is respecting your no-follow requests. Do not entirely rely on no-follow thing. Ruthlessly remove spam links that appear here and there in your blog comments.
If there are tons of spammy outbound links (even no-follow), Matt Cutts may kiss and say goodbye to your blog!
The point of this post is to make you moderate comment links, the same way you moderate quality of the comments before accepting.
More and more low quality, unrelated comment links, gradually (if not at once) lead you to Google’s hell.
Don’t ignore even a small bit of your blog.
Would love to here from you...