If you create quality content, then people will WANT to link to your site, without you having to ask. These are the most natural links you can receive and believe me when I say that Google will eventually figure out if you aren’t linking naturally.

Let me give you an example. I was reading an article recently which lead me to a website which maintains a pretty exhaustive list of “do follow blogs.” Because I think that the site is valuable to you and me, I have linked to it in the previous sentence using the anchor text of “do follow blogs.”  Let me be clear though… the value I found in the list had more to do with some of the blogs that I found and am interested in and less about finding a place to post comment spam.  And my link is a “do follow link”. Technically speaking, a do follow link is just a link that does not use the nofollow tag, which is designed to tell search engines NOT to follow the link.

Why would you want to use a nofollow tag?

Let’s say you have a website that sells products.  You probably have a lot of administrative pages on your site that don’t actually contain content that you want included in the search results, either because of the type of information, or because you don’t want to dilute your links with less valuable links.  You can use nofollow tags to accomplish this. If we talk about Google Pagerank, then a nofollow tag tells Google not to pass some of your pagerank through that link to the other site.

That being said, it’s easy to understand why you WANT sites that link to you to NOT use the nofollow tag. You want some of their pagerank to pass through the link, and you want Google to give you credit for it. Especially if the link is coming from a high quality, authoritative site.   Referring back to the site above which lists “do follow blogs,” if you post a comment on those sites, then the link back to your site does not include a nofollow tag and may help your site generate additional backlinks.  This is healthy and natural when it’s used responsibly because it encourages participation in the blogs.  In fact, this blog does not use nofollow tags because we want you to receive credit for participating. However the other side of that coin is that blogs which allow their comment links to be followed are typically more focused on weeding out the obvious spammers.

It can be abused though, so the one thing I would encourage you to NOT become is a comment spammer… which basically means posting worthless comments simply for the link back to your site.  Find sites that are similar to your site, or complement your topic and get engaged in the conversation.  It stands to reason that if the blog has similar content to you, then you probably share interests and your comments can be meaningful.  Not only will you generate natural links back to your site, but you may generate click through traffic from that site if people see you as posting quality content, and you may even make some friends.

Let me know what you think… how much time do you spend commenting on blogs? Has it affected your sites search engine rankings? How has it affected your networking among peers?