Started a New Blog as an Experiment

John H. Gohde finally got around to posting a post on one of his free blogs about a very popular crime story on Caylee Anthony. And something remarkable happened. John actually got a fair number of hits and comments in just one day. In fact, it ended up being the most successful post to date on his Scribbling & Bibbling blog.

John H. Gohde Commentator, a new blog, was created by John to study how a blog that gets a fair number of real comments on it would rank in Google.

Real comments are written by somebody because they are actually interested in the topic of the post. As a result, they usually do not bother to include a Web site hyperlink. While they are the most legitimate form of a comment possible, they do not carry a lot of weight in Google. Google is looking for votes on the value of webpages. Comments without a hyperlink to a Web site are not considered a vote by Google. Google does not care if John Q. Public likes a particular webpage. They only care if a Web site operator likes a webpage. Hence, Google is saying in effect that for comments to count they essentially have to be a form of Spam. Perhaps, the most benign form of Spam possible, but Spam none the less.

These types of comments are not enough for a blog to succeed in Google. John’s new blog ended up getting a fair number of his posts to stick, but the home page of his blog still ended up in the supplemental index. Hence, in order for the home page of a blog to stick you still need to be pointing to it with posts and webpages on another one of your Web sites. Or, you could build links to it by going around leaving comments on blogs that point to the home page for your blog. Any way that you look at it, you still have to build links to a new blog from other Web sites even if you are getting a fair number of comments on your posts.