Do High DA Backlinks From Blog Comments Help Rankings?

If you have ever left a comment on NeilPatel.com, you’ll notice that there is no URL field. Why? Well, a few years ago, blog commenting exploded. I was literally getting thousands of spam comments a day from people just leaving a comment for the purpose of link building instead of providing value to the community. Sure, there are spam plugins like Akismet , but it doesn’t catch everything. Now, most blog comments contain the nofollow attribute in which they tell Google not to follow the link or drive any “SEO value” to that URL. But still, people still leave blog comments for the purpose of link building. So, over the past 7 months, I’ve been running an interesting experiment to answer the age-old question… Do backlinks from blog comments actually help rankings? Experiment rules First off, for this experiment, we used “domain score,” which is similar to domain authority. If you want to know your domain score, the backlinks report in Ubersuggest will tell you what it is. With this experiment, I sent out an email to a part of my list looking for participants and had 794 websites apply. From there, I set the following criteria: English-only sites – It’s easier to rank on many of Google’s international search engines even without building links. I removed non-English speaking sites as I didn’t want to skew the results. Low-authority sites – I removed any website with a domain score greater than 20 and any site with more than 20 backlinks. The reason being is when a site has a lot of authority, they tend to rank easily for new keywords, even if they don’t build any new links. No subdomains – I didn’t want a WordPress.com site, a Blogspot site, or even a Tumblr site. Again, this would skew the results so I removed them. After eliminating the sites that didn’t meet the above criteria, I was left with 314 sites. Of those 314 sites, many dropped off because they didn’t complete the required work on their part (which was to write a blog post), so I was left with 183 sites at the end that participated. How the experiment worked Similar to my previous link building experiment and my on-page SEO experiment , I had these websites write a 1,800 to 2,000-word blog post on whatever subject that was relevant to their site. The websites had 2 weeks to …
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