How commenting could be dangerous?
I recently noticed some strange things wile viewing my Google Webmaster Tools. While viewing the links coming to my site, i become very happy at the first view but as i drilled in it, it turned to be one of the worst nightmare for me. As since i had started commenting regularly on 15-20 blogs that i follow, i had started loosing my search traffic, my new posts are not indexed in search engine the same day. After two three day’s they are indexed in the search engine, i tried to find out the reason, why it is happening? So i asked some fellow friends on a SEO forum, they suggested me to check the webmaster tools to get a clear idea.
What i noticed in the Webmaster Tools?
As stated, the first sight of the stats delighted me, when i viewed the 408 links coming back to my site. The screen shot attached below shows that, but there are 389 links coming back to colorsofnet.com. These 389 links put me puzzled as i had hardly made 40 to 45 comments on the blogs that i visit, and how could i get 389 links back from them. When i drilled into it to view these linking sites, i got the shock of a life time. Their were two three blogs that were having 100 back links to colorsofnet.com. And these are the blogs where i had made only 2-3 comments.
Why you received so many backlinks from these sites?
When you make comment on a blog, the comment appears in the recent comment widgets that carries your comment and the link to your site (not every comment widget carry your link). Those that display recent comments on every page with the commenter’s URL are actually hurting them. The main reason for hundred of back links is due to poor SEO and use of do-follow in comments. When a crawler crawls a site/blog it crawls a large number of pages at a time and updates them, the number of pages crawled at a time could be hundred, thousand or more depending on the crawler setting for your site/blog. When crawling takes place it captures those pages, and the URL’s with do-follow turns up as backlinks, resulting in hundred of backlinks instantly.
And such a great number of backlinks at a time will drink all your SEO Juice. All the hard work and effort that you had put is gone for the time being.
What you should do?
Firstly, check your recent comment widget for links in it. If the link is showing, apply no-follow to it or delink it from the recent comment widget.
Secondly, inform the blog which had these links in recent comments.
How long will these backlinks remain?
These backlinks are not going to last for ever, they will be gone in the next crawling session of the search engine. Then their will be only one backlink that you will be getting i.e. from the comment that you had made on that topic. But this crawling session may take place after 2 days, 1 month or even more.
Moreover, your efforts should be credited instantly now after a delay. I hope you all agree with it.
So, avoid these mistakes and help others do so. If you liked it than mark it on social networking sites.
RT @tweetmeme How commenting could be dangerous? http://bit.ly/6W7OwU
There are many tactics to courage readers to comment these days such as allowing dofollow links in comments, recent comment widget, top commenter…
I believe there are side effects of abusing these tactics and we must think through these problems carefully before applying them.
A poor design can make all your efforts go in vein, you could apply do follow on comments that appear below a post not on the recent comment widgets.
i still make my reader as priority if dofollow help them.. so i do dofollow..
In your blog you are not displaying recent comments with commentator’s URL, so for those making comments on your blog are benefited with the back link.
Quite informative post.
You are absolutely right. My blog lost one thousand backlinks..in last ten days.. I am happy because i am getting links from few blogs..Where i have only few comments.
Exessive backlinks is not good for seo. I don’t see any changes in my traffic.
Things are turning normal for me too, i will begin promotion after make some changes on the blog.
I think this tips is in line with Google guidelines but we should think about what we need and how to handle this?
Informative post. I faced the same issue.
i will comment only on the blogs having a good pagerank and also unique content