I spoke to the owner of a small business recently whose entire SEO strategy was based on leaving blog comments with a keyword as part of his username.
He came to me because, despite his best efforts, his search engine rankings hadn't improved at all in the 3 months he'd been doing it.
He was obviously frustrated by the fact he'd put so much effort in and had nothing to show for it.
Below is a summary of what I shared with him.
Cheap links stink
Google is having a huge crackdown on cheap links. You can forget about link farms, spammy directories and now most blog comments.
In this particular example, there was a massive spike in the website's backlinks, all of which had exactly the same anchor text. In 99% of the comments left, there was little more than a line or two of general text which contributed nothing to the discussion.
If ranking highly in Google was this easy, surely there would be no need for SEO companies to exist?
Trusted advice?
I also asked who had told him about this method of link building and was told he'd seen it on an SEO forum. I looked at the forum and it was an absolute goldmine of completely outdated and useless information.
There were still posts about keyword stuffing and density on this forum too. If you're going to put all your SEO eggs in one basket (which I wouldn't recommend), then at least make sure the information you're listening to is credible.
Do you follow?
The final nail in the SEO coffin for this particular chap was the fact he didn't know the difference between No Follow and Do Follow backlinks.
When I examined the list of links he'd built through blog commenting, it turned out the majority were actually No Follow links. This meant even if these sites had been relevant, high authority sites, (which they weren't) there was no benefit in terms of 'Google Juice' being passed through to his site as a result of his comments.
I felt really bad for this particular small business owner (who was happy for me to share this story) because time is money and he'd put a lot of effort into his strategy. It just turned out it was flawed from the very outset.
The takeaway from this is to do your research before embarking on any DIY online marketing activity. A few more hours spent on coming up with a proven strategy could save you a whole lot of time and hassle in the long run.