Chain Links Stephen Cronin of More Than Scratch the Surface asked me to elaborate on my comment about people wasting their time building links with "DoFollow" blogs when I wrote my thoughts on themes, RSS and splogs. There are many ways to build backlinks to your website, but I'm only going to touch on two of them.

DoFollow Blogs

Blogs that have disabled the rel="nofollow" (in other words, blogs which use plugins to change to "DoFollow") attribute in comment header links can be good sources of backlinks if used correctly. There is one caveat: The comments may appear to be comment spam to the blog owners or other casual observers.

Most people aware of having their comments followed still only enter their name and main website address in the comment header. I'm one of those people. Anyway, what we end up with is a bunch of backlinks that use our names as the anchor text. These particular backlinks are practically worthless for link-building and keyword/phrase authority. What we should be doing is using keywords or key phrases instead of our names and using specific page URLs. There's one drawback: If the content of the page being commented on isn't related to our keywords/phrases, the backlinks won't do much to improve our authority for them. They'll be better than the first kind of backlinks, but not as good as backlinks related to the content of that page. I've tested these techniques since January of 2008, but I could still be wrong. Google changes their algorithms all the time and what's true today may not be true tomorrow.

In my opinion, it isn't worth the effort to try to manipulate the DoFollow blog comments unless, of course, you have a lot of time on your hands. If you want to do it (and I'll do it on occasion just to see what happens), you may want to include a signature near the bottom of the comments so the blog owner can see that you're not a link spammer.

The CommentLuv WordPress Plugin

The CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin removes the rel="nofollow" filter that WordPress adds by default to comments, regardless if the attribute is removed by a DoFollow plugin. It attempts to parse the feed URL for the website in the comment header URL. It doesn't always work. When it does, the full post title and URL for the latest post from the commenter's feed will appear at the bottom of the comments. If you're in the habit of stuffing slugs, titles and content with keywords, you'll get excellent backlinks on blogs that use this plugin.

Again, however, there's the same drawback with the backlinks. If your post title isn't related to the page you're commenting on, it'll lack authority. At least this method doesn't require any extra work on your part.

The Combination

The best blogs to build your backlinks are those that are DoFollow blogs and use the CommentLuv WordPress Plugin. You can get two excellent backlinks at the same time. This is one such blog. Feel free to use the backlink building techniques here, but be advised: I click through these kinds of links when I see them and I delete spammy looking comments at will, as per my comments policy.

(Image source: BioRUST)