It is widely know that getting back links to your site will improve your rankings with the search engines but getting links by leaving blog comments is commonly over looked.

Those of you that aren’t using blog comments for back link have probably heard some on tell you about no follow tags and how the search engines won’t follow the link from comment on blogs.

There is a trace of truth to this but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use blog comments to get back links because there are some blogs that don’t have the no follow tags on their comments.

The default installation of WordPress automatically adds the no follow tags to the comments but if you know what you are doing you can find blogs that don’t have the no follow tag or will remove the no follow tag in return for you making a certain number of posts.

Before I get into what to look for to find blogs without the no follow tag I want to cover comment etiquette.

Any comment you leave on a blog MUST have something to do with the content of the post.

If the post you are commenting on is about writing articles you don’t want to leave a comment about extreme sports. If you site is extreme sports related you can have the link to your site but the comment text needs to be related to the post.

You shouldn’t put a link in the body of your comment unless it is directly related to the post and is information that won’t fit in the comment itself, such as a video.

Most of the time when I set up a blog I set the comments in the discussion area so that if you put links in the body of the comment it will send your comment to moderation where I have to review and approve or deny the comment before it is posted. This stops all the spammy links.

Now your name or I should say the form field where you enter your name. This should be your name or your moniker. For example I will use Randy The Hermit because more people know me that way than by my normal last name. Your moniker can have keywords in it (only helps if there are not any no follow tags) but it should be related to you or what you do. For example if you teach people how to blog you could use the moniker Blog Boy or Blogging Teacher but your moniker should stay the same no matter what you use for a link.

That is brief overview of comment etiquette, basically it is the “Golden Rule” don’t do anything on another person’s blog you wouldn’t want done on yours. But I bet there are still of bunch of you asking why you should bother if the no follow tad is in place?

There are a number of reasons why you should do this:

1.It is still a link to your site that people will see and possibly follow. If you leave 5 blog comments per day that is 1,500 links in a year that might catch the eye of the reader and could get you traffic.

2.If your comments are on topic and informative people will remember your name and you will become a known expert in the field. This is part of the reason you want to use the same name.

3.Just like above if your comment is interesting people will click on your link out of curiosity just to see what else you have to say.

4.If you are selling advertising on your site through a service like text link ads they sometimes do their own back link research and ignore the no follow tag. This could result in you receiving more income from your ads.

There are the reasons to not worry about the no follow tag but what if you want to find blogs that don’t use the no follow tag in the comments?

You can find a post with comments and look at the source code for the page, scroll through all the code until you find the comments and then look for the no follow tag. Yes, this is awkward but it gets the job done.

A better way is to use an addon for the FireFox or Flock browser (these are the browsers you should be using). This addon is called SEO for FireFox it is provided by SEOTools.com or you can find it by searching for SEO for FireFox addon in Google.

This addon will give you a bunch of information that can be used for SEO but the one feature that we are interested in now is the no follow highlighting. What it does is look at all the links on the page your viewing and highlights all the no follow links in red. If the name in the blog comment isn’t red then the no follow is shut off on that blog.

There are a couple of plugins that blog masters will add to their blogs that automatically removes the no follow tag from the comments and another plugin that will reward the people that comment frequently by removing the no follow tags from that individuals comments. This plugin is Lucia’s Linky Love.

Once Lucia’s is installed the blog master can set up the comments so that after a person make so many comments the no follow tag is removed for that person.

It does require that you use the same name and the same email address for every comment (I believe I mentioned using the same name above).

The owner of the site can set the limit from 3 to whatever they feel like but most of the time if they are using the plugin it is set from 3 to 5. This means you will have to leave a relevant comment 3 to 5 times before the no follow tag is removed but when it is removed it is removed from any comments you make from there on.

You might now be wondering how you find blogs that are using Lucia’s Linky Love, the easiest way to do this is to go to Google’s Blogsearch and search for your keywords in quotes plus Lucia’s Linky in quotes (it should look like this “keyword phrase”+”Lucia’s Linky” ) and you should find some posts for your keywords that this will apply to.

On my blogs I usually have this set at three and I review the comments on a regular basis any comments that read like pure spam I delete. Because I delete them the spammers never get to the magic number of three and the no follow stays in place. This leads to more comments that are usually more informative.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.