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Are all comments with links spam?

Are all comments with links spam? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Denver, Colorado. Chase asks, “Google’s Webmaster Guidelines discourage forum signature links but what about links from comments? Is link building by commenting against Google Webmaster Guidelines? What if it’s a topically relevant site and the comment is meaningful?” OK. Well, I leave topically relevant comments on topically relevant sites all the time. So if somebody posts an SEO conspiracy theory, and I’m, like, no, that’s not right, I’ll show up. And I’ll leave a comment that says, here’s a pointer that shows that that’s not correct. Or here’s the official word or something like that. And I’ll just leave a comment with my name. And I’ll even often point to my blog rather than to Google Webmaster blog or something like that because I’m just representing myself. So, lots of people do that all the time. And that’s completely fine. The sorts of things that I would start to worry about is it’s better, often, to leave your name, so someone knows who they’re dealing with, rather than “cheap study tutorials” or “fake driver’s license” or whatever the name of your business is. Often that will get a chillier reception than if you show up with your name. The other thing that I would say is if your primary link building strategy is to leave comments all over the web to the degree that you’ve got a huge fraction of your link portfolio in comments and no real people linking to you, then, at some point, that can be considered a link scheme. At a very high level, we reserve the right to take action on any sort of deceptive or manipulative link schemes that we consider to be distorting our rankings. But if you’re just doing regular organic comments, and you’re not doing it as a, OK, I have to leave this many comments a day, every single day, because that’s what I’m doing to build links to my site, you should be completely fine. It’s not the sort of thing that I would worry about at all. Hope that helps.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: