What anchor text do you use when leaving a blog comment?

[Henrik Flensborg]

I have never been blocked yet. It's not a keyword phrase but my website name.

Yeah, there's a big difference between linking to brittany-murphy-fired.blogspot.com (current #2 Google Hot Trends) and linking to a keyword-rich, but naturally sounding domain name.

[lisahartwell]

This came up at Ed Dale's recent seminar because some investigation using Market Samurai showed that a drop in rankings for an attendee's website was mainly due to many of the backlinks (especially the high PR ones) to the site being hyperlinked using the site owner's name not the keywords.

So (as an example) in the eyes of the search engines this would look like the focus of the site was Lisa rather than Women's Business.

The site owner was an active blog commenter but didn't want to seem spammy by adding her keywords in the name field. Fair enough! Ed Dale actually said he was uncomfortable about people using keywords in this field, although others who were answering questions felt there was a fair compromise: if your company/website name has your keywords in it then you can add that in the name field as this is essentially who you are. Then sign your comment with your real name (AND offer a comment of good value - not just a "I love your site and will visit regularly")

Some blog owners will not have a problem with this as you are giving value. I personally think it's worth trying in order to get good backlinks from higher PR sites.

But, again, I would stress that it all depends on the comments you are making. If I see someone has made an effort to read the post and comment appropriately then I don't have a problem with this. If the person has left a lame comment and/or tried to add another link of their own into the comment then I hit the spam button.

Lisa

[AlexNewell]

Blog commenting is mostly about building a relationship with the blogger and perhaps getting traffic.

The limitations of a blog mean that it is not a sensible way to build links for SEO. That's why we do article marketing, create web 20 properties etc

[jkgourmet]

Blog commenting is mostly about building a relationship with the blogger and perhaps getting traffic.

The limitations of a blog mean that it is not a sensible way to build links for SEO. That's why we do article marketing, create web 20 properties etc

Alex, what's a "web 20 property ?????

[AlexNewell]

OK then maybe I should write it as web 2.0 but often it's written as web20, I guess out of laziness!

So that's squidoo, hub, twitter, facebook...all the user generated content and socal networking sites...

[jkgourmet]

Ah - that I understood. Primarily because about 2 months ago I asked "What's Web 2.0"

[AlexNewell]

"So just comment on blogs where you do have something to say."

Welcome to SSWT Steve and that's good advice for forums too

:-)

Alex

[lindastacy]

I've always commented just using my real name (and only when I have something to say - advice I totally agree with). But I also have a site at my real name dot com so I guess it's okay if my name ranks well.

If you Google me it's a bit creepy though... in position #5 is "In Loving Memory of Linda Stacy."

I have a "comment policy" on my blog that asks people to use their real names. I'm pretty lenient about it if it's someone I know or the comment is meaningful and thoughtful. But I just edited one today to take out the keyword link.