In my last post called Link Party Anyone? I talked about joining link parties to help generate some traffic to your blog. I thought it was important that I now talk about Link Parties and SEO, and what link parties can’t do for your own blog or website’s SEO. And additionally, I’ll talk about comments and links as well.

When you join a link party, the link that you leave to your own blog or website does NOT get noticed by the search engines. Many people do not realize this; even I didn’t realize this for a long time, to be honest. Nor do most people realize that when you leave a comment on a blog along with a link to your blog or website, in most cases, that comment link also does NOT get noticed by the search engines.

In the case of link parties, widgets and java scripts generate the link party forms on a blog from the link party host (like InLinkz or LinkyTools, the two most popular link party hosts). That means that the links that are left by participants in the link party are all stored at the link party host. And those links are set to NoFollow by default, which prevents Google and other search engines from following those links. If this weren’t the case, not only could spam become a big problem, but websites could get a seriously inflated and false page rank, just by joining lots of link parties. And Google doesn’t want that.

Likewise, most blog platforms, like Blogger and the free hosted Word Press, have comments set to NoFollow by default in the template, preventing any search engines from following links left with comments. And they do this for the same reasons noted above. If you want search engines to follow the links left with comments on your own blog, you have to modify the NoFollow rule to become a DoFollow. How you do that depends upon which blog platform you use. You can also consider switching to another commenting system, one which creates DoFollow links, like CommentLuv or IntenseDebate.

Link parties and blog comment links are still a good way to get some human traffic to your business or personal blog or website, regardless of the NoFollow/DoFollow status of the blog in question. But I wanted you to be aware of the SEO aspect of link parties and comment links, so that you will understand exactly what to expect when you leave your website link in those places.

Backlinks are very important for your site’s link popularity and placement in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages), so it’s always a good idea to keep a watchful eye on how many you have. Quantity is important, but so is quality, where backlinks are concerned.

There are other sites like that one out there on the Web. If you find some others you like, post a comment with the link!