I’ve been playing with a neat little (free) tool the last couple of days. It alerts you *immediately* when you favorite bloggers post something new.
This isn’t an RSS feed reader, but rather a way for you to hightail it to the blog in question and add a comment. It’s faster then RSS - you can set it to poll the blogs you enter as often as you’d like.
On high traffic blogs, being the first commentor will drive considerable clicks and traffic to your own site - imagine being the first to respond to a Techcrunch article, John Reese Income.com update or Darren Rowse post - thousands of people will see your response.
Of course, it’s imperative (if you want people to actually visit your site) to leave informative, insightful comments. Just writing, “Great post!” won’t entice as many click-throughs.
If there are notable blogs in your industry you’d like to grab a piece of the traffic action from, Comment Sniper is an awesome way to do it.
Hat tip to Jack for the tip!
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Do Nofollow Links Count - Redux
by Michelle MacPhearson on February 19, 2008
I like blog commenting as a link building strategy. If you can add to the conversation, it’s an easy way to get both human visitors and backlinks.
But what about “nofollow?”
Nofollow is often ignored. Last year, Ben Fisher did a case study to see if nofollow links counted - they certainly seemed to, based on his results. Neil Patel “broke” the story with screenshots, and that post is now recognized as the “nofollow is BS” authority.
Because I recommend tools like CommentHut and Comment Sniper (which server 2 very different purposes when trying to get traffic from blog commenting), I often get emails from folks asking about the “nofollow” issue - why comment on blogs if it’s nofollow, blah blah blah. So it’s clear there’s still some confusion within the population on the value, if any, of nofollow links.
I thought I’d run the same study as Ben did last year and see if I could get my site to rank for a keyword that (1) is not on my site and (2) only use blog comments to get anchor text links for my keyword. I, like Ben, chose a misspelling simply because I’d be able to see results very quickly that way.
The term: ultilevel marketing
The results as of 5:44pm PST on 2/18/2008 after leaving about 15 blog comments with the help of Comment Hut to find relevant blogs are that I am ranked #1 for the keyphrase in Google, Yahoo and MSN:
What does this mean?
Some 30 Minute Backlinks users have noted that occasionally, software directories nofollow their links. Clearly, based on the results above, nofollow links *do* still contribute value to a site’s rank in all three major search engines. Any links that happen to be nofollow received by way of 30 Minute Backlinks continue to add to a site’s overall link profile and ability to rank for it’s keyphrase.
Edit 2/22/08 to correct my misspelling of the misspelling
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