Within the WA training Kyle goes over what he calls “Commenting With Intent.” Basically it is your intent to sprinkle links to other relevant content on your website to help the person that left the comment to engage further. The more engagement the better your rankings.
USING SITE COMMENTS
Whether you are using Site Comments or within your WordPress comment area, the steps to leaving links are pretty much the same. Because there is a slight difference, I will explain and show you what it looks like for both separately. On this page I will show you Site Comments.
In the image above I was replying to a comment left on a scam review I did on an MLM company called ACN. The commenter mentioned how difficult it is to sell products in the MLM structure and how you must buy a certain amount of products to qualify for commissions.
Seeing how I knew that I had a video on another post which clearly portrayed the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme, I decided to link to that post within the comment. I worded my reply so the anchor text of the link is relevant to what I wish to share. Using my mouse I highlight the text.
After I highlight the text, as seen in the above image, I go to the top of the comment area just under my name and I click on the Link icon. This will now display the “Insert a Link” pop up as seen in the image below, which will show you all of your published pages and posts.
You can either copy the URL you want to link to and paste it into the URL field, you can search for the URL on your website by typing a keyword in the search field, or scroll down through the displayed pages and posts within the list.
Once you have the URL you want to link to in the URL field you may want to click the checkbox under the title field for opening new URLs in a new tab. I personally do not check this box if I am linking to other content on my website. I only check it when linking off to another website.
My reason for this is when linking to another website like an affiliate link, I do not want my website reader to lose connection with my website. However if I am linking to other content on my website, my reader will not be leaving my site. The choice is yours. Now click Add Link.
Once you have added the link to your comment reply it will appear as blue text as seen in the image above. You can now approve your website reader’s comment and your reply with the added link. The below image shows the entire comment reply with the link in the last paragraph.
NEXT UP = How to insert links within comments using WordPress
Reply
When this happens to me and the comment is relevant to my post, I will most times do a Quick Edit of their comment and take out the link. If their comment is not relevant to my post I just delete the entire comment.
Most of my comment replies are made without links to other pages or products. But, when it comes up in the reply, I will add a link to more information - or, a product that I recommend - to give the commenter more to go on. I don't think too much about keeping links to 10% or less - but, it probably works out that way.
The one thing that bugs me is my theme automatically makes my links red. I can change them in my posts to the familiar blue, but, SiteComments and WordPress don't give me that option for the comment section. Any ideas on that?
Jim
Your approach to commenting is the way it should be done. Only provide the link if the comment warrants that you do so. When the link is an affiliate link, like Kyle says in his training, it should only be in the comments of the relevant review.
Wow! That is a head-scratcher. I have never seen something like that before. Have you looked into the theme settings to see if there is a default color for links that you can change? What theme are you using?
Jim
I believe backlinks still play some roles but as you mention it has to be from sites that have higher authority(Not necessary Wikipedia).
I believe Google is going to slowly reduce its importance but for brand new websites how do they judge the value of the site?
I believe it still comes back to the number of quality links + brand mentions online + engagement.
Regards
ZhengYu
He says that Google considers backlinks as a very minor ranking factor because they are no longer needed to determine authority and SEO rankings.
Google judges the value of a website based mainly on the quality of your content first and foremost, your target and LSI keywords second, click data third, and comment engagement last.
To read about what David told me about SEO and how Google is now ranking websites, you can read my parts 1 & 2 blogs called I Had Dinner With Google Last Night at the link below. I Had Dinner With Google Last Night But in short, backlinks are no longer needed to get high rankings and authority on Google and the search engines.
