Houzz Comment Links

[RandyEpp]

A company I am working with has been posting pictures and links to their website in the comments section of Houzz articles. I notice many companies have been doing this in general. While it generates decent amounts of traffic, I am wondering if google sees 30 links coming from article comments that it will deem that as spam?

My gut tells me to send these comment links to the Houzz member profile, then direct them to your own website.

Thoughts?

***Anyone in home design, decor, etc. should really get involved there. Fantastic source of business for professional in that field.

[GeoffKenyon]

Hey Randy,

A couple things here. First, a big part of you being targeted by Google for comment spam depends on proportions - if you have 30 links in comments pointing back to your site and you only have total links to your site, then yes, that could be a problem. If you have 4500 links pointing to your site, probably not a big deal.

If you have a decent size backlink profile, and the links in comments drive a decent amount of valuable traffic, I wouldn't shy away from this. If I did it, I'd just use the naked URL, not any anchor text. They already nofollow comment links so I wouldn't worry about this.

Finally, while this might not be bad, make sure that you're adding value to the conversation, not just dropping in links - not worth it to upset people and get yourself blocked.

[Robert_G]

If those comments are generating traffic it's ok, but I'd apply a nofollow tag to the links. They're simply not natural.