Thoughts on Blogs and SEO

Category: Professional

Thoughts on the use of Blogs in SEO.

I need to research on the use of links from blogs in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

1. You have a blog and you have a web site. You write five posts a day, and each post has a link to your web site, so that makes a 150 links a month. So these are a 150 external links to your web site, provided each post of yours has a permalink (i.e. each post, however small, comes up as a separate web page).

A point to understand is, will these 150 links show up after a period of time, when a link:www.yourwebsitename.com search is done, and will it have an impact on your search ranking?

A real life example would be, a Software/ITES outsourcing company has a blog that links to its homepage with keywords like software, outsourcing, application, business, development, ites, bpo, call centers, india, outsource, voice, web, email etc.

This would be worth trying.
Do these links from a blog to a web site have an impact on the search ranking of the homepage.

Q: How important would contextual linking be here?
An example: You have a post on movies, which links to your web site selling financial software, and from the same blog you have a link on sports, one on programming, and another one on software marketing; and all these permalinks have a link to your web site.
So what would be the criteria for the search engine to decide the importance of each link, as it comes from the same main url? Does the search engine grade each link the same, or is a damping (0.85 for Google, is it?) or a devaluing factor applied, or are all those links taken as related (similar pages) links.

2. There are thousands of blogs and most of them have a comments link. Suppose you check a hundred blogs related to your blog or your industry, and leave a comment on each one of them, with a link back to your blog or homepage, then would these links be taken as external links to your site, and hence improve your search ranking?

I suppose, this would not be so, as comments from blogs, even though with separate ids (that is each comment is a separate link), are not considered as external links, and this won't help in SEO.

3. A lot of blogs are used for self-promotion. For example, there are a lot of blogs that follow the method explained in point no. 1 and link back to their web sites from a web blog. For example - mortgage, easy finance, multi-level marketing, gambling, drugs, cheap softwares, and other such blogs; and there are a surfeit of them on blogspot.com

The first point is worth trying - to understand its impact on search rankings.