Does google value blog comments as backlinks?

Question

I recently read an article which said that google doesn't count blog comments as backlinks. I'm not sure about that since, I have 3 sites that rank first with all their backlinks being blog comments. But I just started working on a new site, and have built over 250+ blog comment backlinks on yahoo, but none appear on google. What happened?

P.S. The site is really new. So it might be in the sandbox, but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

A link is a link regardless if the page is part of a blog or not. What does affect a link's value is:

1. Is it nofollow? If so the link has no value.

2. Is the page the link is on in Google's index? If not then the link has no value until that page gets indexed.

3. Is the link in a page with content related to yours? If so, it has some value. If not, it has very little value.

4. Does the page with the link on it rank well for search terms you are trying to rank well for? If so, it will carry more weight then if the page was on a topic unrelated to yours.

5. Are there a lot of links on the page with the link on it? If so, the value that link is less then if there fewer links on it.

Answer 2

Google might have better anti-spamming filters than Yahoo!. PageRank is designed to attempt to rank webpages by usefulness by looking at their backlinks. But this only works if the backlinks are organically generated, not if you purchased them or otherwise create them yourself (e.g. ads, link exchanges, link wheels, blog spamming/content spamming, etc.).

Unfortunately, a lot of unethical webmasters don't care about this and try to game the system. This has resulted in a drop in the quality of search results on all major search engines.

However, Google has been fighting back in several ways, including by analyzing how backlinks are generated. If a new site goes from having zero backlinks to having 10,000 in a single week, and there doesn't seem to be any pattern to the backlinks generated aside from their being on blogs that allow comments, then that's certainly going to raise some red flags.

It's also going to be suspicious if a site develops tens of thousands of backlinks from easily forged/manufactured sources (low PR sites, blog comments, forums, etc.), and yet they fail to gain any backlinks from reputable sites.

In short, if all your external backlinks are created by you by spamming blogs/forums/social media sites/etc., then those backlinks really aren't an indication of quality content or usefulness. So Google isn't going to be motivated to rank your site highly using those backlinks. In fact, it's an incentive for Google to penalize your site for blackhat practices.

Also, the same applies to blogs and similar sites that don't protect their user comments with nofollow anchor attributes. If Google sees a blog that has thousands of backlinks to completely random sites, and most of the linked-to sites are spam sites, then they're going to devalue that blog's links. So being the 100th webmaster to spam an unprotected blog isn't going to do much good.