Commenting tricks for successful link building

Link building is nightmare for many website owners. Whether you have a personal blog or a website to market your product or service, you cannot ignore the importance of link building. When someone searches in Google, google fetches all the pages that match the search criteria and assign a rank to each search result. The assignment of a Google rank depends on the popularity of the website. And one of the most important parameters, which determine the page rank, is backlink from other sites.

Let us closely look in this matter. Google believes that if a website is popular and having good content, it is referred through links from many other websites. More the number of backlinks, the more popular the site is. So, when deriving the page rank, Google gives good weightage in number of backlinks to the site. But, it is not pure number of links, which all matters. It also takes into consideration of the popularity of the webpage from where the particular site is being referred. Thus a link from a high PR site carries more weightage than a low PR site. In other word, Google simply believes that high PR sites are more credible.

Photo attribution: Mschel (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

Now, as I said in the beginning, link building is often a daunting task, though it is not impossible. There are many ways that you can create links. For example, you can write an article for some other website. This is quite time consuming and also, you will be at the mercy of the other websites to approve your article. Since Google considers comments and as well as forum as a place of reference, providing comments is one of the fast ways to build your reputation. But there is a small trick. When considering popularity by considering number of backlinks, Google also considers outbound link from your page. And these outbound links nullify to some extent the popularity that you gained by having inbound links from other sites. As a result, most of the websites mention the outbound link as “nofollow”. This tells Google that the mentioned link may not be a credible source and it doesn’t crawl further down.

You leave your comments in a website in order to continue your link building exercise. But, the site may be a “nofollow” comment site and hence you will not get any credit because of such link. Thus, it will be complete waste of your time, if you spend time to leave comments in such sites. However, there are number of sites, which encourage providing comments and do NOT have the “nofollow” attribute. There is a Firefox extension, which helps you to find out the “nofollow” links. You can download the extension by clicking on this link. It is a good practice to find out such websites and leave your comments on regular basis.

While leaving comments, you need to keep in mind few things. See from the angle of the owner of the website, where you are leaving your comments. The sole purpose of the comment section is to invite feedback and receive views from different angles. In such scenario, it is not expected from you to leave just a comment like “nice article”. Many times such comment is treated as spam comment. Thus, don’t leave a comment only for getting a backlink. Provide meaningful comment aligned to the original article.