Purely from a SEO perspective, is it a waste of time to comment on blog articles where the anchor tag associated with the commenter’s URL is set to rel=nofollow ?
purely? yes
there might be other reasons why you would do it, but there’s no seo benefit
Pretty much, yes. You’ll get no googley goodness at all from a “nofollow” link. The only benefit you’ll get is the small chance of a little bit of direct traffic from fellow readers if your link is very relevant to the discussion and looks interesting and you build up a reputation as someone trustworthy with something to say worth listening to.
Forums aren’t here to help you build up your link profile, they’re here to build communities of like-minded people discussing topics that interest them. If you want to join in one those communities, that’s great … and you might get some benefit to your site on the side. But if you’re only in it for what you can get out of it, don’t bother, don’t waste your time and everyone else’s.
Yes, commenting on nofollow blog just for backlinks is utter wastage of time.
But these blogs are important at their place. I believe that if a blog is nofollow then its blogger is conscious enough to control the spam on the blog.
I would prefer to comment on such blogs because other people who are commenting on these blogs are genuinely participating in the community and you are getting exposure among good people of your niche.
There is a definite SEO benefit to commenting on nofollow blogs - provided you do it the right way.
- The comment needs to be worthwhile so that real people will follow your link to find out more.
- The page you link to needs to be interesting enough that some of the people who followed the nofollow link from the blog will create their own links to the page.
It is those links that the real people create elsewhere that will provide the SEO benefit.
Can’t agree more. Though commenting on nofollow blogs got little link juice, the keypoint is once you paticipating in the discussion and share something useful, people from other follow blogs might came to your website. And more important thing is, you can’t make sure all your backlinks are follow, are you? So just make it natuaral, when you want to comment, comment.
I agree with “felgall” that nofollow link can benefit you if the user of that blog or website from where you get that link is impressed with your website and link back to you from his/her website that is dofollow, in that case it can benefit you. But for that you need to have very appealing information on your website so that it can impress that person to link back your website.
Other point is that it is true that you can’t get the link juice but you can definitely get the visitors through nofollow link from a blog if your comment is interesting and informative that creates a curiosity in user to switch to your website for more information.
Yeah, many blogs & the sites that are receiving more traffic have generally made the links Nofollow. Also that’s fairly from the prospective of controlling the spam. But I don’t agree that NF links are completely useless. Building backlinks is more important. I have seen my site doing well enough for the keywords for which I have built 60%(maybe more) backlinks which are NF.