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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.