Early on it seemed that many people who commented on blogs, wouldn’t use their name, but would rather use descriptive terms that describe their business. The goal here is to create keyword rich anchor text in an attempt to boost one’s search engine rankings. I am sure that I was guilty of this early on, but I have to say it just doesn’t sit well with me.

Although I use a spam filter, I get no fewer than 30 of these per day that slip through the filter and are waiting for me to approve or disapprove. I always disapprove, and most of all, I disapprove them and flag them as spam which (hopefully) helps to get them added to the “blacklisted” database in my spam filter.

commenting on a blog is about dialogue and creating community, not blatant self promotion. Trust me, I do occasionally get the urge to use a keyword or phrase for the name, especially when promoting a new site that I am trying to drive relevant to. And at this point, I need to point out that this would be a personal project, and never something I would do for a client site. This should also be an indicator that it falls in the “grey” area in terms of what is considered acceptable practice by me – and Google would probably push it more towards the unacceptable.

So what is the take away? Commenting on blogs is a great way to build community, get exposure, and build trusted backlinks, but I strongly urge you to resist the temptation to do this.

“Slow and steady wins the race” ~ from Google’s Webmaster guidelines – paraphrased by me

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