REPOST: Is Backlinking from Blog Comments a Good or Bad SEO Tactic?

Marketers usually look to backlinking as one of the best tools to achieve higher rankings in search results pages. But the question lies on how it affects the credibility of the website and builds SEO credit. Read the article below to learn about proper backlinking strategies to help your website gain credibility and get ranked in organic search results. 

 

Image Source: business2community.com

In the ongoing fight to get your website ranked highly by Google, many folks look to backlinking as one of the best options to achieve this result. But, is it a good idea or not to employ this sort of tactic?

Before we start anything, I will state categorically, “Do not buy Links!”

The reasons for this will be self-evident as you read on.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is quite simply a link from a website back to your website. For example, your company is listed on your local Chamber of Commerce website and they place a link on their site back to your website. That’s a backlink!

Here’s another example of a backlink from the Yellow Pages.

So, why is it important to get backlinks? A simplistic overview, without going into too much detail and boring the life out of you, is that quality backlinks from high ranking domains give SEO juice (credibility) to your website. And subsequently, Google looks to rank your website higher in the organic search results.

It’s similar to a business referral. If you get a referral from someone you know and trust, then you know that the referral is worth a lot to you. Get one from someone you don’t know, and the trust factor diminishes substantially.

But what about placing backlinks in the blog comments section of a website?

Why Is It A Bad Idea?

As SEO tactics go, placing backlinks in blog comments is not necessarily a good or bad thing. However, if you are using the tactic solely as a way to gain more SEO credit, then you are wasting your time and will ultimately hurt your website’s credibility. Some of first things to keep in mind when making comments on a blog are: “Is the website and discussion related to my own business?”, “What value are you bringing to the discussion?” and “Are you furthering the discussion by offering alternative viewpoints or information. In essence, “Are you bringing VALUE?”

In this example, the original discussion was about using cloth diapers vs disposal diapers on a pregnancy website. You can tell from the comment that they are not adding any value at all. Because this particular website has a high domain ranking, they simply placed so text and a link to their own website home page to try and garner some seo juice. While the tactic may work in the short term, Google’s algorithms will catch up with you eventually and ding your website in a way that you may never recover from.

Just placing a link in a blog comment does nothing and you should get nothing out of it if that’s all you bring to the table. Writing comments like, “Wow, great article you really nailed this one, link,” also serves no purpose for the reader. If you sell Pink Dresses and place links on websites that deal in Nuclear Fusion or Casino Gambling, why should you get credit for this when it has nothing to do with Pink Dresses?

To illustrate how these tactics can affect you, a 2011 article by the New York Times concerning J.C. Penny shows just what can happen if you use “black-hat” tactics to try and subvert the ranking process.

J.C. Penny hired an SEO firm to help them try to get their website pages to rank higher in Google search results. After a period of time, the tactics seemed to be working. Many of their website pages started to rank very high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, they started beating out their own supplier’s website pages in the SERPs. But what J.C. Penny did not know was that the SEO Company was placing hundreds of links all over the internet to influence the rankings.

When information came to light about how J.C. Penny (their SEO Company) achieved these results and the information was reported to Google, their rankings plummeted down faster than someone wearing a pair of cement shoes in a body of water. This is what Google did:

“On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against J.C. Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite Carry On Luggage.”

Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was No. 1 in searches for “Living Room Furniture.”

By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

In other words, one moment J. C. Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country. The next it was essentially buried.”

You can see that just placing links on websites with no relevance to your product can cause you massive problems. J.C. Penny fired their SEO Company and worked hard to correct the problem.

When is it a Good Idea?

As we mentioned earlier, placing comments on blog articles is good when you have something of value to offer. The reader will be further engaged, informed or educated about the topic. The process should be looked at as one of building social influence, rather than one of link building. Developing a relationship with particular websites and making regular contributions via comments in blog articles will have a better effect on your social influence than getting a backlink. You must also keep in mind that many influential sites that allow blog comments have “rel-nofollow” attributes assigned to them. So, you would get no SEO credit for the backlink anyway.

If you do leave a link, make sure it has good anchor text. Don’t leave link looking like, http://businessname.com/pinkdresses, put “Pink Dresses.”

So What Should You Do?

Backlinking is still an important part of gaining website online credibility and getting yourself ranked in Google’s organic search results. But it is hard work. Here are a few things you can start to do:

Develop Relationships. If you find a site that has influence in your industry, start to develop a relationship with them. Ultimately, if you bring value to them, they may give you value back by giving you a backlink.

Guest Post. Some people say this method is dead, but I disagree. Getting original content onto influential websites not only provides them with additional value to offer their audience, but gives you a powerful backlink. Don’t forget to ask them if they provide a backlink before you submit anything to them.

Directory Listings. This is still a good method of getting a free backlink. It is especially helpful if the directory listing site has a high domain rank.

It’s not easy to build quality backlinks. There are companies that charge thousands of dollars to maybe get just 4-6 top quality backlinks for you. It takes time, patience and the desire to do things the right way!

Do it the wrong way and like most things in life, you’ll pay for it!


SEOP is a highly rated digital marketing and SEO firm with over 12 years of experience offering powerful and high-performance online marketing strategies that put your name on top of organic search results and above your competition. Click here to learn more about the company’s game-changing web services born out of its years of experience as a digital marketing leader.

REPOST: The Simple Truth About SEO

Forbes contributor Brent Beshore met up with highly experienced business owners to talk about the real deal on SEO. The meeting provided him with simple, yet valuable SEO insights which he further discussed in the article below.

Image Source: forbes.com

 

A couple weeks ago, I got a call from one of our portfolio company’s CEOs, who was frustrated by his confusion around SEO. He felt like he just couldn’t get a straight answer. Each “expert” claimed to know the secret sauce and recommended different strategies, most of which they (eventually) admitted could result in Google GOOG -0.34% penalizing the site.

I set up a meeting with a small group of highly experienced entrepreneurs who had built multiple Inc. 500 companies with SEO as a primary marketing strategy. Here’s what they explained:

The secret is that there is no secret. SEO isn’t complicated. Like anything, there is a depth of knowledge that helps fine-tune strategies, but 90 percent is merely about consistently doing what feels natural and testing. They specifically cautioned against trusting anyone who claimed to have an inside track. Instead, they recommended focusing on amplifying what feels like a natural extension of the business.

Do the basics. Google needs to be able to determine a general ballpark of where your organization is relevant. Proper site structure, meta tags, and keywords still matter, but they’re just the start.

Everything is moving to quality. Search engines want to provide the most relevant information. It used to be far easier to game the system with loads of links and specific anchor text. Times change. Now, the signals of relevancy revolve around a far more diverse set of information like social endorsement, repeat traffic, frequent mentions, and helpful content.

Links still matter, with qualification. Google rose to prominence because of PageRank, which was based on how academics use citations to determine relevancy. Google equated links to citations and revolutionized the search industry. Links haven’t gone away, but evolved. Instead of merely looking at the link and anchor text, Google is analyzing many factors, including the traffic derived from the link (indicating interest) and surrounding text. The entrepreneurs recommended focusing on helpful, relevant content for links instead of a specific “link-building” campaign.

Pay attention to social signals. The biggest change in recent years is a move toward social signaling, although they said it has moved slower than they anticipated. Search engines are trying to gauge actual authority, and a robust social following is a strong indicator. Google+ is an obvious signal. They believe that while social builds slowly and without strong ROI, the socially rich will continue to get richer.

Video is tough to “game.” Search engines are putting more weight on areas that are tougher to game. Video is expensive to produce and, subsequently, is not used as frequently in questionable tactics. They recommended incorporating it into the marketing plan as a secondary strategy.

Product integrations are providing mountains of data. Google has always been acquisitive and has amassed an incredible array of products that are constantly throwing off data that’s being used to validate relevancy. From Gmail and Google Maps to the Chrome web browser and Google+, the number of checkpoints around a company is staggering. This allows Google to be incredibly adept at distinguishing “SEO tactics” from normal operating protocol.

SEOP is one of the finest in search engine optimization and digital marketing. Visit this website to learn how the company can put your brand on top of competition through its extensive range of award-winning, high-impact strategies tailored to your unique requirements.

REPOST: Matt Cutts: Write Clear, Understandable Content

In Google's Webmaster Help Forum, Matt Cutts provides tips on how technical content should be researched, produced, and delivered in order to encourage positive interaction and engage the general consumer audience. Search Engine Watch collates the highlights of his discussion.

Image Source: searchenginewatch.com

 
As webmasters, it's constantly drilled into us that quality content is key as part of an SEO strategy. But when it comes to more technical content, how should you handle it?

Should your content be geared toward a higher, more specialized reading level, or should it be written in such a way that novices on the topic can understand? This is the topic of the latest webmaster help video featuring Google's Matt Cutts.

Many webmasters are hyper analyzing their content lately to ensure that however they present the content and readiness is going to rank the best in Google. But how can you find this balance between super technical writing and writing aimed at the general public who might be interested in the topic but don't have knowledge behind it to understand the more complex discussion or vocabulary?

Cutts began by sharing what is likely a familiar scenario for many. You end up at Wikipedia trying to find background information on a topic, but it's either way too technical or simply not understandable.

"So you see this sort of revival of people who are interested in things like 'explain it to me like I'm a 5-year-old'," Cutts said. "You don't have to dumb it down that much. but if you're erring on the side of clarity, and on the side of something that's going to be understandable, you'll be in much better shape because regular people can get it, and then ... feel free to include the scientific terms or the industry jargon, the lingo, or whatever it is."

It seems Cutts believes you should strive to strike the right balance between technical writing while still ensuring that the average person can understand it.

"You need to find some way to pull people in, to get them interested, to get them enticed to try to pick up whatever concept it is you want to explain," Cutts said. "So I would argue, first and foremost, you need to explain it well, and then if you can manage to do that while talking about the science or being scientific, that's great."

Cutts said that how you explain a topic often matters almost as much as what you're actually saying.

"If you're saying something important but you can't get it across, then sometimes you never get across in the first place, and it ends up falling on deaf ears," he said.

What about if your target audience is a group of people that are industry professionals or have the same sites reference you? You don't necessarily want to alienate that audience because you dumb it down too much for the general public.

But on the other hand, you want your content to be approachable by the masses, because that opens you to a much wider audience than the smaller group of technical people you might currently target.

Sometimes it's about finding a balance or writing for two different audiences with different content for each.

"If you're only talking to industry professionals, exterminators were talking about the scientific names of bugs, and your audience is only exterminator experts, then that would make sense" Cutts said. "But in general I will try to make something is natural sounding as possible."

He also suggested a tried-and-true techniques that many people have used for years: reading your content aloud. Often you can pick up the little mistakes or the awkward sounding parts, such as excessive use of keywords, when you read it out loud.

"When I'm writing a blog post, I'll sometimes read it out loud to try to catch what the snags are, and where things are going to be unclear," Cutts said. "Anything you do like that you'll end up with more polished writing, and that's more likely to stand the test of time."

Bottom line, don't focus on being so technical that you're excluding a lot of the audience that might want to learn more about your topic, but just can't understand it because you're not explaining it well.

SEOP delivers high-performance and results-driven SEO strategies to help your brand stay on top of the search results pages and on top of the game. Read more about the company's dynamic and high impact web services here.