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Will backlinks from commenting hurt or help SEO?

I've found some sites with high DA, PA: DR 40++, dofollow but high OBL.

(Examples redacted by edit)

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Will adding a comment to this page with a link to your website hurt your SEO?

Yes, it will hurt your SEO. Good back links are all about three factors:

  1. PageRank
  2. Relevancy
  3. Authority

It is a huge mistake to pay attention only to PageRank and ignore the other two link factors.

Is your link relevant on this page?

This page is in Japanese. It appears to be about travel and spiritual. Unless your own site is in Japanese and somehow related to the subject of the linking site, it is not relevant.

I don't see a single link in the comments or trackbacks that looks relevant. The majority of them are to spammy topics.

Does this link have authority?

Authoritative is all about who created the link. Links in comment or trackback sections have no authority, because anybody can create them.

So how does it effect SEO?

Including your link in the comments section on this page is a clear signal to Google that you are a link spammer. Google is likely to make a list of all the sites that comment here. If your site appears on several such lists, Google is likely to label your site as spam. Your site won't appear in Google search at all anymore.

If you want to get links to your site, they can't be anywhere you can create the links yourself. You need to find relevant pages for your site where your link would make sense. You need to have an authority create the links for you.

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    Not sure if this should be a comment or new question - you wrote "Authoritative is all about who created the link. Links in comment or trackback sections have no authority, because anybody can create them.". While this certainly sounds logical do you have any evidence/have you tested if Google can and does differentiate comments from main content and if so do you have thoughts on whether this is platform specific (eg WordPress and other well defined CMS's)?
    – davidgo
    Commented Dec 20, 2020 at 19:06
  • Because of the amount of link spam due to comments, Google put a lot of work into identifying comment spam it finds on the web. Their "penguin" algorithm did a lot in this regard. Google is (as usual) tight lipped about the details, but quite has been written about what they are likely doing. See How Google Might Use the Context of Links to Identify Link Spam for example.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Dec 20, 2020 at 19:25
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    Googlebot can usually tell the difference between the comments section and the main content, especially with a widely used CMS like WordPress. Google also knows which sites allow comments but don't nofollow links in them. On sites like that, Googlebot may not trust any links on the page depending on how well it thinks it can isolate the comment section. Google will also initiate manual action penalties against sites where it finds their links among other spammy links.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Dec 20, 2020 at 19:26

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