There is a common idea in the SEO world that all links will help your site gain rankings so you should get as many as possible and blog commenting is an easy way to do this, thus the spam.

This actually did not start out as a experiment but rather a system designed to get relevant topical links from blogs to our websites. This work went on for 6 months. I have decided to post our work as this can help others make up their own decision on whether to go down the blog commenting path solely for the purpose of search rankings.

The System

We built an application that gave the commenter the fields to paste in including the name field, the website url, email address and keywords they could use to find revelant blog posts for the website given, using a random search engine that would popup for them including google’s blog search, technorati and a few other smaller blog search engines that specialized in dofollow (only used 10% of the time). Google’s blog search was used the most as it was given a higher chance to show at 80%.

For the value of the name field that would be the link anchor text they were given random names made up of real names and combo SEO names: John and John best (best is used for many keyword searches). After they had finished commenting there was another field in our form where they could post the url where they commented at so that we could moniter their progress and scan for links. The application prevented them from adding in a URL they had already commented on previously.

I put a job up at odesk for data entry people because this way I could train them from scratch to use our system and follow our rules. I hired 20 people to begin with to test them over a 2 week period, I tested for english skills,ability to search for relevancy and write relevant comment, and how reliable they were. 20 became 4 different blog commenters after 2 weeks of testing and each were told to comment for 10 hours a week so that is 40 hours a week of blog commenting.

They commented on dofollow and nofollow blogs however they did not know about this nor where told about this, I wanted a variety of both.

Our sites

• There were about 20 sites they built links for across various topics including finance, sport, ecommerce as well as other niche sites.
• They were mostly 10 page informational sites, 1 or 2 had product comparison so an extra 100 pages of categories with product listings and product pages
• No extra content was added to nearly all the site over the 6 month period.

The Blog commenter Rules

• Use the blog search engine that is shown to them (rotating basis) using the keywords given or related keyword phrases. Don’t use only the same one all the time.
• Read the blog post and make a relevant comment not a spamming one that is promoting something, never promote anything. Copy and paste the given values for the other fields on the blog comment form.
• Must comment on relevant blogs and put where they commented into our system so we could see their progress.
• After 3 months they were told only to comment on blogs that had at least 1 previous comment this way they didn’t waste their time commenting on blogs that were rubbish or never approving any comments. Although it maybe easier for an SEO person to spot a rubbish blog that they wouldn’t bother with, for a common person they might not know.

After 6 months the findings were

• The commenters averaged 5-7 blog comments per hour, so that is about 1 comment made very 10 minutes. This is good rate considering search time for relevancy, reading time and making a good comment.
• The average success rate of a blog comment (link gained) approval was only 26%. I believe this might be a little bit higher if we had put in the rule about only commenting on blogs with at least 1 comment from the beginning not half way through at 3 months.
• Of those comments that were approved, 35% were dofollow. This is high considering they mostly used Google’s blog search to find blog posts, this means there are a lot of blogs out there that dofollow.

Did it increase search engine traffic of any of the 20 sites, well basically NO. There were 2 sites that did have content added to them a few times and search traffic increased slightly for them but not much.

Our conclusion is that blog commenting can bring relevant traffic but not rankings it’s far better to add regular content to your site than link build. Adding content that is highly relevant to your audience attracts long tail search terms that you couldn’t even image before.

Happy blog commenting! If you like

A lot of people tend to think SEO is some scientific secret that only a few people know. However it is quite simple and this article will explain it for you. Getting your site to rank higher in Google and other search engines requires you to do only 3 things: Create great content, get relevant sites to link to yours, and design your site with your visitors in mind. That’s all you need, if anyone tells you different then they might be trying to impress you with complicated talk.

Creating great content

Content means good text, pictures, video, applications and tools basically anything that you can put on your site is content. New articles that are relevant to your industry is an easier way to put content up quickly and is a fantastic way to keep your visitors coming for a good read and that is why it is a ranking factor. If you can put images and video that are useful or interesting then that is even better. Be sure to put content up on a regular basis as this way the search engines know your site is active and stays fresh not some old out of date site that is no longer relevant.

Getting links from other sites

When other sites link to yours that is like saying they think your site is useful for their visitors to visit also so it makes sense that the more links (votes) you have the better your site probably is thus it is a ranking factor. Having links from relevant websites gives you more ranking power than an off topic site as Google considers it from a user point of view, why would someone visiting a fishing site be interested in a site about mechanical engineering? They are more likely to be interested in fishing material. A lot of people build complex systems to gain many links at once but most will be from low quality sites and these systems have the ability to get your site penalized by Google.

Designing a good user experience

This becomes more important as Google and other search engines start to focus on user behaviour on your site, it makes sense because if users are staying for a long time on your site that likely means your site is useful for that search phrase and people want to stick around. If your site is hard to read or navigate then people are going to leave quickly, make sure that everything is clear and easy to follow with no unnecessary features.

The main point of all these rules is to keep your visitors in mind when doing anything for your site, the better it is for your visitors the more rankings you will get and that’s the way it should be.

Why hire someone to do search engine optimization for you then if it’s so easy? Take a read.

950

So your website is enjoying good rankings as the result of your search engine optimization each month and all of a sudden your traffic disappears so you check your favourite keywords that have been bringing in the visitors and your website is no where to be found on the first, second, third or any google results page! Panic sets in and you can’t understand what has happened! How can google do this to you, you thought you were getting good at SEO?

Yes it’s happened to me before and it’s unofficially called the 950 penalty among webmasters. What happens is that your page or pages have dropped to the bottom of the serps and can sometimes be found ranking around the 950 mark! Which is rather useless. It is what I call a penalty for over optimisation, in other words you have done to much and triggered an alarm to say this website has been seo’ing a lot.

After the panic dies down a little you realize you need to take action so how you can you get out of it? Here’s what I did to help get my sites out of the hole:

1. Check your keyword density.

Do many of your pages have a high percentage of keywords that you targeted? You don’t need your phrases in there that many times that includes the Title, meta description, header tags. Your density should be very low at least 3% there are plenty of free keyword density tools out there, just google it. Here’s one that I found useful. Check your image <alt> tags also for any repetitive keyword stuffing.

2. Inbound link anchor text.

If you know seo then you know that keywords in the anchor text in the links to your site are important so what you have been doing is building links to your site with the same keyword phrase in it but did you vary it at all? You know if you did or didn’t.

If you didn’t vary your anchor text then it’s time to get those links changed! Of course you probably won’t be able to change them all nor do you need to but you for the ones that you can change easily do it, and vary your anchor text keywords.

If you have been varying your anchor text then this will require a little more research, you will need software that can analyze all your backlinks and anchor text. The report will be able to show you the percentage of anchor texts that link to your page for example ‘red widgets’ was the phrase that made up 30% of the links, ‘buy red widgets’ made up 10%. By analyzing my competition also I was able to see that some of the phrases I was no longer ranking for actually had a lot higher percentage than other websites for example a competitor had the phrase ‘red widgets’ on 15% percent of the links to it. So I set out to vary the anchor text of any high percentage phrases, I reduced it to around 10 to 15 percent because the keyword phrases that I no longer ranked for all seemed to have a higher percentage than 20%

3. Duplicate content

Check for duplicate content such as meta descriptions you should make sure that all of your meta descriptions are unique and are describing the page correctly. A lot of CMS’s will let you put a default meta description and use it on every single page of your site. You will be suprised at how writing good meta descriptions for your pages will help your rankings. If you think about it the meta description is very important to google, it’s what they show in the search results underneath your title. Besides doing it for google you should do it for anyone that will see your page in the results, think of it as an advertisement for the person to click through to your page, make it enticing but don’t over do it.

4. Internal linking

This is similiar to number 2 in that you should be varying your anchor texts, if you have a lot of internal linking going on make sure they don’t all have the exact same phrase to the same page.

5. Exernal links

For your pages that dropped did they have a lot of external links to low ranking pages? Try reducing them to about 10 and definetly no more than 20, create inner pages that can link out rather than putting them on your target rank page. I don’t think external links to high ranking pages hurts at all as google can see you are linking to quality so it’s likely that you are a quality page too, it makes sense.

5. Validate your HTML

Lastly I don’t think this matters much but it can’t hurt, you should validate your html there maybe some huge errors in there that you could easily fix.

So that’s all I did, basically getting rid of a lot of keywords within the content and varying the incoming and internal link anchor texts. Mind you I did these things over a period of 2 months because I wasn’t sure what would work or not. I saw results after another month, if you did all these changes at once I would expect you to see results sooner.

There is a huge discussion about 950 on the webmasterworld forum take a read of the whole thing and you should be able to come up with a few other adjustments you can try.

And as with all things search engine you’ll have to wait a few weeks or months to see the results!

This our very first blog entry. The aim of this blog is to provide informative information on how businesses can use the power of the web to help them grow.

Many small businesses in Australia don’t know,understand or have the time to learn how the internet can help them increase their sales. We want to provide easy to understand information that can help people leverage the power of the internet to their advantage.

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