About 3 years ago Google posted the following excerpt to their official Google blog:
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
For most of the previous versions of WordPress, the is the default setting for external links. Most people would probably agree that legitimate non-spammy comments should not be penalized. There is a DoFollow plugin for WordPress that will disable the automatic rel=”nofollow” attributes added to external links. This makes sense to do this if you have good spam filtering for your comments, or if you moderate your blog. BinaryWolf activated the last year, so that non-spammy commenters get a backlink.
So, a great way for getting backlinks is by commenting on blogs and including the URL for your site. However, if your link is assigned a nofollow attribute by default, it won’t be considered as a backlink. If backlinks are important to you, it may be worth the extra effort to discover blogs that use DoFollow to disable the nofollow attribute and add your comments to those particular blogs. Of course, post a comment only if you have something of value to add to the discussion and not just to get links.
An easy way to to find these blogs that accept comments is to use search engine friendly blog commenting software. After your download and install the software, you type the keywords or a keyword phrase that you want to find blogs for and when the search is complete, select a blog URL. The page opens directly in the software. You submit your comment and then open the next blog and submit the next comment, etc. This is a great way to increase search engines and human traffic to your web sites, boost your natural search engine rankings and gain dozens (if not hundreds) of high quality backlinks to your websites.
