A few years ago, spamming blogs and forums with links in an effort to increase your number of inbound links and gain search rankings was all the rage among unscrupulous, black hat link builders. As more and more blog owners and forum moderators became inundated with junk postings, something had to be done. Enter the NO FOLLOW tag.

The search engines wisely decided in an effort to curb all the “link spamming” taking place across the net, that they would allow site owners to use a specific tag to communicate to them that a link was not to be counted as such. In other words, even though a site may contain a link back to a spammer’s site, the inclusion of the NO FOLLOW tag would tell the search engines to disregard the link totally.

Nowadays, 90% of all forums and blogs are, by default, protected by this NO FOLLOW tag. Research has shown that it has indeed slowed down the increasing problem of link spammers; after all, what’s the point in wasting time placing links everywhere if they do you no good? So does that mean that those of us doing ethical link building should ignore blog commenting and forum postings as a valid method of link building? Absolutely not!

While not all the links that we post in forums and blogs will count towards our search rankings, they do have an important impact on website traffic. The key is, instead of “spamming” random links across non-related sites, to search out on topic sites and join the conversation.

For example, if you have a site about landscaping then find relevant posts or blog entries on other landscaping sites and make intelligent, on topic responses to them. In essence you are becoming a part of the site’s community.  If you provide helpful information, tips or tell others where they can find such resources then your comment is likely to be seen as insightful and not get removed by a moderator.

The benefit of this kind of link building can be surprising. A review of some of our sites’ analytics has shown that as much as 30% of our monthly website traffic was generated by other sites where we had previously placed on topic links. These visitors are usually interested to know more about your topic or are in search of something you stated could be find at the website you’ve linked to.

At Moxie Search Marketing on topic blog and forum linkbuilding is just one of the many techniques we use to increase your visitors, your leads and ultimately your sales and profit. Call us today and we can begin drafting a customized Internet Marketing plan just for your business.