Getting links as a commentator
Posted by multippt
Commenting on blogs has never been more easier: Type in your name, email, website, and your opinion. All that should take only 5 minutes. However, not all blogs will give you a link worthy as a backlink - in fact most blogs will give you nothing much other than a platform to express your opinion. Despite this, there are some blogs that do give link favor in return for your activity, a fair trade ain’t it.
What blogs can be used?
Not all blogs will give links to their commentators; most blogs will not return link favor now that Google is encouraging the nofollow movement. There are some that do though, which brings us to Dofollow blogs.
Dofollow blogs
Unlike nofollow blogs, dofollow blogs do not implement the nofollow portion of links. Most blogs prior to 2001 were dofollow - because nofollow was not invented. Today’s a little different, nofollow is now everywhere. Fortunately, there are some who decided to remove nofollow from the comments - so, every comment with a link in it gets some nice juice, pretty neat eh? Let’s hope nofollow doesn’t reach forums any time soon.
Dofollow blogs consist of 1% of all blogs. The small number of them is a result of the nofollow movement supported by Google/Blogger (of course) and Wordpress as well. There are D-Lists that shows a list of such blogs, one such list is available at Courtney Tuttle. Don’t worry if none of the dofollow blogs fancy you, there are nofollow blogs as well which do fetch traffic.
The small amount of blogs participating in dofollow is probably because it results in link juice leakage, but it does off a nice incentive for commentators to stay and comment on your blog. The original intent of nofollow is to reduce spam - which apparently is not successful on most blogs. Well, at least Google doesn’t forbid removing nofollow from comments.
Your blog can participate in the dofollow movement with a handy plugin known as the Dofollow plugin (it wasn’t too hard to guess right? :) ).
The commentator contest
If dofollow blogs are good, blogs with commentator contests are probably better. This contest is Generally, all one needs to do is to remain at the top of the pile - and will get a link throughout the entire blog (usually) as long as they comment regularly. More popular blogs tend to employ this (including nofollow ones), giving it a nicer effect than new blogs employing dofollow. A magnet for long-term commentators if your blog has incredible popularity.
Your blog can participate in it using this nice plugin - The top commentator widget. Don’t forget to display the widget somewhere in your blog, otherwise it’s pointless.
Quality of links?
Sadly, links coming from dofollow blogs are not of the highest quality: your are isolated to a few pages. This is unlike the commentator contest, which gives a higher value, especially if it appears on every single page, most notably the main page. But, winning links in a commentator contest is much difficult than getting a link on a dofollow blog, which could be a consideration considering activity and the lifespan of a link. Well, at least links obtained from commenting are much better than links obtained in an exchange.
Win-win for commentator and blog-owner?
The idea of giving link juice to users in exchange for activity is quite a nice concept. Yes, it is a win-win situation for both, despite your site having a link juice leakage. Giving out links to commentators is a way of keeping blog commentators, and perhaps invite the normally quiet community.
