Thanks Tom. Right back at’cha!

I posted the question to a trusted SEO forum and while I didn’t get a definitive answer, no one said “No. They don’t count.” So in the article I made the claim “You can improve your website’s rankings with links from blogs.” My reasoning was that when you either put a link in your comment or put your domain name in your signature, the links will be counted by the search engines. It seems reasonable, right? A link to your website counts as a link to the search engines. That’s where I was wrong.

I should have realized that the search engine spammers had already thought of this, abused the hell out of it and Google had to put a stop to it. To prevent “comment spam” Google uses the “no follow” tag. The “no follow” tag tells the search engine spider not to follow a link which prevents the search engine from counting the link toward a website’s rank. So while humans can click on the links, they don’t help your website’s rankings after all.

It’s not all bad news though. Links in the blog post still count; just not the links in the comments. Also, humans can still click on the links and wind up on your website which is the ultimate purpose of SEO after all. In the quest for better rankings, we tend to lose sight of the fact that SEO is not an end in itself. The purpose of SEO is to get visitors to your website. It doesn’t matter if they got from doing a search on Google or if they got there from a blog as long as they get there.