BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

Software to Help You Build Links by Posting on Blogs

If you haven’t heard anything about software that helps you find blogs where you can leave a comment and get a one-way incoming link to your website, here’s some information you’ll find useful.

I looked at a software program called Comment Kahuna.  I think that software and others like it are good tools to use if, like everything else related to SEO, you make a commitment to wear a White Hat when you use it.

Things to Keep in Mind

1.  Leaving generic comments on a blog isn’t a White Hat strategy.  If someone leaves a comment on this blog that is something like “I really love this blog.  The information is very useful.”, I will delete it and I think anyone else would do the same.  The purpose of commenting on a blog is to establish or continue a dialog on the topic of the blog post.  Generic comments aren’t helpful.

• The commenting software allows you to store “profiles” that consist of an author name, email address, URL and comment.  The software will automatically insert the information in the profile into a blog’s comment fields. 
• But, if you aren’t going to actually read a post and come up with a valid comment, then you’re abusing the system.  I’d suggest using the first three fields, but writing a valid original comment for each blog post.

2.  Building backlinks by posting blog comments only works if the search engines put a value on the links.  There are two places where the search engines could be instructed to ignore an outgoing link. 

First, there could be a tag in the header on a blog page that looks something like this:  rel=”nofollow”.   Second, there could be an argument added to a specific link:  rel=”external nofollow” or rel=”nofollow”.   The bottom line is that if there is any type of a nofollow tag on a page, the odds are that outgoing links will not be acknowledged by the search engines.

• Comment software can be used to find sites that use the nofollow tag on their home page.  But, you’ll really need to evaluate each website yourself to determine whether links are set up as nofollow.  Here’s why:
  • The software can spot a nofollow on the home page of the blog.  However, most blogs don’t display comments on the home page.  So, if there are no comments, the software can’t tell if the links are set up as nofollow or not.
• The best thing to do is to use the comment software to identify blogs on a specific topic.  Then, for each blog that is identified as being nofollow-less, you will need to:
  • Find a post that has comments.
  • Go to the page with the comments on it.
  • Look at the source code for that page (View-Source or RightClick-View Source)
  • Do a search for the characters nofollow  (Edit-Find in a notepad file)
  • If nofollow is discovered on the page, mark the blog accordingly

 What Comment Software Can Do

Commenting software can be helpful in finding blogs on related topics and automating some of the tasks required to submit comments.  But, you can’t just use the software in the hopes that all the work will be done for you.

If you’re going to use blog comments as part of your link building strategy, make sure you select the right blogs and that you put the effort into writing useful comments.  Part of the result from commenting on other blogs is that real people might visit your website, as well as the search engines. 

Thoughtful or insightful comments will go a long way toward encouraging other blog visitors to visit your site, too!