When people get into the internet marketing game, whether for law firm internet marketing or marketing some other kind of business, one of the first things they’ll hear from people is that they should get out there on as many blogs as possible and start leaving comments with their website url in the comment to start generating some “social traffic.” Today we’re going to talk about whether or not you should to that, and what kind of help it really gives you.
First, let’s talk about what kind of help it gives you. If you ask the internet marketers that call and try to sell you services, they’ll tell you that the comments help you in one primary way – they give you links from other people’s sites back to your site, which Google loves because these count as “votes” for your site. The more votes you get the higher your site will appear in the search rankings.
The problem with this, though, is that Google knows that people do this and has come up with a way to prevent it. It’s called the nofollow tag. The nofollow tag is a type of computer code that tells Google and the other search engines that no authority should be given for this link. So, for example, if you are trying to do some personal injury lawyer marketing and you go leave a bunch of comments related to personal injury with a link to personal injury lawyer in the comment you don’t get any credit for this. And you’ll piss of the blogger because they know exactly what you are doing.
Which leads me to point number two, why you shouldn’t do this. Whether or not Google likes you leaving comments, when you do it just for the link, the blogger hates it. In fact, what you are doing is spamming the blog. And trust me, there is a lot of comment spam floating around out there. And the thing about it is, most people just brush it off, but some people go the extra mile and call you out. And when you get called out, it can affect you and your internet marketing strategy for a significant period of time.
Bottom line here is, if you are commenting because you have something relevant to say, that’s great. Put your link in there so people can see who you are. But if you are doing it to get some Google juice and don’t have much to add to the conversation, don’t do it. It doesn’t help.